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ENJOYING LIFE 

AND OTHER LITERARY REMAINS 



Enjoying Life 

AND OTHER LITERARY REMAINS 

OF 

W. N. P. BARBELLION 



" I love everything, and detest one thin^ only— the 
hopeless imprisonment of my being within a single 
arbitrary form. . . ." — Amiel. 



NEW YORK 
George H. Doran Company 









Gift 

Publisher 

SEP )7 I92Q 



PREFACE 

The ungrudging tributes paid by most of its critics to 
Mr. W. N. P. Bcirbellion's " Journal of a Disappointed 
Man," and the interest confessed by many readers in 
the personality of the author, with inquiries for more 
of his writings, if any might exist, encouraged his 
friends to release for publication some examples of 
the work of Barbellion as a naturalist and a man of 
letters. 

" The Journal Essays " in this collection are 
from the original journal, which extends to over 
twenty post quarto volumes in manuscript. It was at 
first intended that these essays should be included in 
the published journal, but they were omitted then in 
order to bring the first book within reasonable dimen- 
sions. The rest of this new volume is made up of 
contributions to various periodicals and of other 
essays now published for the first time. They cover 
the period from 1905, when Barbellion was 16 years 
old, to 191 7, and they dispose finally of suggestions 
which have been made that the " Journal of a Disap- 
pointed Man" was not authentic but the work of 
Mr. H. G. Wells, who wrote the generous introduction. 

Barbellion is of course a pseudonym, as Mr. Wells 



vi PREFACE 

himself pointed out in a letter to the Westminster 
Gazette, and, with the publication of these essays, it 
is open to anyone with sufficient curiosity to refer to 
the original sources and discover the real name, 
already known to Barbellion's friends. The final 
section contains so much of Barbellion's writings 017 
natural history as may be of interest to the inexpert 
reader. These are quite apart from his scientific 
memoirs, about thirty in number, that appeared in 
such journals as the Zoologist, the Annals and 
Magazine of "Natural History and the Proceedings of 
the Zoological Society of London. Barbellion was 
not an academic student, and his attitude to those 
whose minds run along channels of dry formulae is 
suggestively set out in " The Scarabee Monographed." 
He did not allow his interest in biology to dull the 
edge of his perpetual wonder and his sense of beauty. 
He was full, when occasion demanded it, of compact 
but unappealing forms of scientific description; but 
his deepest motive was his passion for a knowledge of 
life. That gave humanity to his researches, and in 
his writings transfigured science with beauty. " Bees, 
poppies, and swallows," he wrote, " and all they mean 
to him who knows " ; they meant more to him than to 
most men. He went out among the birds, and was 
too much taken with the beauty of the woods to do 
any nesting. He dissected a sea-urchin, and was much 
excited over his first view of Aristotle's "lantern." 



PREFACE vii 

" These complicated pieces of animal mechanism 
never smell of musty age after aeons of evolution." 
His imagination was fired, and there was, so to say, 
the flush of dawn over every glowing investigation. 
He interrogated nature with a fierce inquisitiveness 
which inflamed his approach to everything that came 
within the survey of his finely-tempered mind, and all 
was subjected to the " acid test " of intellectual 
integrity. That was his outstanding characteristic. 
He never shirked a fact, ignored a consequence, or 
feared a conclusion. He faced them, one by one, 
squarely and boldly. He gripped life by the 
shoulders, his keen eyes steadily searched its enig- 
matic countenance, stare for stare, and he gazed 
profoundly into its depths. It exasperated him, 
enthralled him, baffled him. He saw its joys, its 
loveliness, its irony, its perplexities. He traced the 
comedy of it. He lived the tragedy of it. He com- 
bined uncompromising exactness of inquiry with 
spiritual apprehension of the indefinable. For that 
reason he devoted himself to science humbly, almost 
with reverence ; and he buckled on all his armour for 
the great task. 

Concurrently with his unaided zoological studies 
he developed a shrewd interest in literature, and these 
two sides of his complex personality seemed to 
struggle for ascendancy. The heroes of his boyhood 
were Huxley and R. L. Stevenson, and they had 



viii PREFACE 

places of equal honour on his bookshelf. Francis 
Thompson's glowing verse — particularly his lyrics on 
the daisy and the poppy — competed with Wilson on 
"The Cell." He was poring over Hardy's novels, 
reading them almost in series one after another, while 
he was studying Lang's " Comparative Anatomy of 
the Invertebrates." Samuel Butler's "Note Books" 
was his bedside tonic. He found sympathetic reading 
in the Russian novelists. He appreciated the hilarious 
philosophy of Chesterton's "Manalive" as keenly as 
the sombre stuff of Dostoievsky and Turgenief. His 
knowledge of biography and of journal writers was 
remarkable. His private correspondence — like his 
diary — was rich with literary allusions, frequently the 
most out-of-the-way detail. His reading was wide, 
and his views on books had a distinct flavour of 
originality and a " bite " all their own. He staggered 
and stimulated you in the same breath. He set Jane 
Austen laughing at Gibbon's autobiography, and he 
sang to himself Moore's "Row gently here, my 
gondolier." In his brilliant fancy a movement of 
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was " an epileptic vision 
or an opium dream — Dostoievsky or De Quincey set 
to music." He loved Charles Lamb. He read 
Nietzsche and felt "a perfect mastiff." He plunged 
into literature full-heartedly and searched for any 
glimpse of life or psychology of living. He found life 
in literature as he found it in science, and what one 



PREFACE ix 

failed to give him the other supplied. His essays, 
zoological and literary — published or unpublished — 
are packed with illustrations and comparisons from 
every kind of source. They indicate the extent of his 
acquirements and the ramifications of his interests. 
This is apparent in " The Passion for Perpetuation," 
which is also an illuminating example of his general 
attitude towards the facts and riddles of existence. 
It holds suggestive thought and analysis, it throbs 
with a whirlwind desire for experience and adventure, 
and it reveals the bigness of his personality. He is 
frequently looking out from the mountain-tops, pro- 
jecting himself across the ages, and flinging his 
imagination among the planets. " Let us not be 
niggardly," he says, " over our planet, or ourselves." 

When his open-air spirit had to taste the close 
atmosphere of officialdom at the British Museum and 
his natural buoyancy was depressed, it seemed likely 
that, before long, he would turn to literature with his 
whole mind, though his enthusiasm for the country- 
side could never have died. Even in the " Scarabee 
Monographed " he writes indulgently of the dry-as- 
dust, and he is continually pulling himself up, so that 
one cannot reach a definite conclusion of what he 
really thinks of the Scarabee. Any Scarabee could 
win his heart by quoting " The beautiful swallows — 
be kind to them." He had many literary schemes in 
project, and his mind seemed to be focussing away 



X PREFACE 

from the scientific on to the literary. But inexorable 
fate swept aside every choice and every power of 
fulfilment. 

My belief is that Barbellion's first promptings to 
natural history are to be found in Kingsley's " Water 
Babies," which was read to him when he was too 
young to read it himself, or even to speak plainly. 
Later, he puzzled through " Madam How and Lady 
Why " ; one day the sight of a thrush's nest stirred his 
soul, and soon his child's mind was fully captivated. 
His concentration and determination were astonishing. 
His diary contains a mass of records on nests dis- 
covered, birds observed, and experiments carried out. 
There was no limit to his energies. He had the 
schoolboy's exultation in his egg cabinet, his pigeons, 
doves and rabbits, and a joy still more precious, 
because it clearly signified the early promise of his 
inquiring zeal, in his well-constructed ants' nest, his 
ingenious labyrinth of orientating newts, and his 
sleeping bats withdrawn in more than one perilous 
adventure from the deep recesses of a disused mine. 
He skinned a mole and cured the skin, stuffed a 
squirrel and glazed and painted a case for it. He 
spent all he could get on the purchase of books and 
instruments. Assiduously he built up a library. At 
eleven years of age he wrote to me " You know my 
bookshelf where there were only six books — well, it's 
now half full." He made use of the attic, the out- 



PREFACE xi 

house, even the kitchen, for housing specimens under 
observation. He would race home after school for an 
early tea specially prepared by Martha, the maid, and 
would tramp miles among the garlic-scented orchards 
and through the wildest parts of the country, return- 
ing often after dark with home lessons still to be 
tackled. Martha, who worshipped him, begrudged 
him no mess or muddle. He was treated by her, as 
by his parents, with an indulgence shown to no other 
member of the family. As a boy he was contributing 
articles to The Countryside^ whose editor predicted 
that he would make his name. He taught himself how 
to dissect, and afterwards, his patient and unerring 
skill surprised his incredulous examiners. Scientists 
and naturalists of repute — reading his published 
records of observations — called upon him and were 
puzzled to find him a mere boy. He taught himself 
enough German to read the text-books. Day after 
day, with his devoted spaniel, he went out on expedi- 
tions over the hills, across the sand dunes, or along 
the marshes of a magnificent estuary that always 
made a special appeal to his imagination. He 
invented all manner of makeshift contrivances, and 
exercised adroitness in overcoming obstacles. His 
importunities at a small library resulted in the build- 
ing up of the nucleus of a modern collection of 
scientific books out of all proportion to the size of the 
town and the tastes of its people. The librarian was 



xii PREFACE 

a kindly botanist, who succeeded in getting many 
new books that Barbellion wanted. 

The consuming passion of his life was almost too 
violent for his delicate physique, but his terrifying 
will power refused to be baulked. By sheer personal 
force, and with no outside help, he won his way 
against trained competition to the British Museum. 
What he had worked for and lived for, with such 
keen anticipation, proved a deadening disappoint- 
ment. Nevertheless, he achieved solid results as an 
official zoologist, and of these Mr. Wells has said 
elsewhere : " His scientific work is not only full and 
exact, but it has those literary qualities, the grace, the 
power of handling, the breadth of reference which 
have always distinguished the best biological work. 
... In him biological science loses one of the most 
promising of its recent recruits." 

So far as I know, his outdoor studies virtually 
ended with his appointment in the Museum. But I 
have a vision of him in 191 2, during a holiday 
snatched from its dingy Departments, as he started 
off for dredging operations, loaded with all kinds of 
tackle, smoking a cigarette, grinning at our amuse- 
ment, and looking as happy as a man could be. He 
could impart his nature knowledge in a fascinating 
way to those who showed a genuine interest, and he 
was delightful company on a ramble across country or 
in a lazy stroll by the sea coast, though if he detected 



PREFACE xiii 

a merely formal attention which seemed possibly a 
polite concession to his interests, he withdrew like a 
sea anemone at the touch. Scrambling over the rocks 
with him on a brilliant spring day and wandering 
among his beloved rock-pools, I had a picture which 
has never left my memory. Upon one of the pools 
the sun was shining, and kindling every liquid colour 
to sparkling hues. A squid, like a glorious iridescent 
torpedo, was gliding to and fro in perfect motion, and 
as we downward gazed he told me its life-story with 
such deft strokes of happy illustration, that the recol- 
lection has given romance to every rock-pool I have 
ever looked into since. His diary is full of descriptive 
cameos like that which was given to me, and I regret 
to think that, in steeling himself to compress his 
journal within self-prescribed limits for publication, he 
omitted so many of these beautiful little studies. 

" Bees, poppies, and swallows, and all they mean to 
him who knows." 

This introduction is in no sense intended to be a 
critical estimate of Barbellion's writings. One stands 
too near to him for that. It is intended as a personal 
appreciation so far as it seems to bear upon the 
contents of the book. Nor is this the place for a 
general estimate of his arresting and powerful indi- 
viduality. Yet it is impossible to resist the impulse 
to say of him, in pride and affection, that through life 
he played a iine game, 

a R C, 



CONTENTS 



JOURNAL ESSAYS 

ENJOYING LIFE 


PAGE 

3 


CRYING FOR THE MOON 


21 


INSULATION OF THE EGO 


43 


INFINITIES 


57 



ESSAYS 

ON JOURNAL WRITERS 

THE PASSION FOR PERPETUATION 89 

POSSESSION 107 

ON AMIEL AND SOME OTHERS II3 

AN AUTUMN STROLL 1 23 

TWO SHORT STORIES 

A FOOL AND A MAID ON LUNDY ISLAND I31 

HOW TOM SNORED ON HIS BRIDAL NIGHT 1 39 

ESSAYS IN NATURAL HISTORY 

SPALLANZANI 1 53 

COLONEL MONTAGU 171 

ROUSSEAU AS BOTANIST 1 83 



xvi CONTENTS 

PAGB 

THE SCARABEE MONOGRAPHED 1 93 

NEW METHODS IN NATURAL HISTORY 207 
CURIOUS FACTS IN THE GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION 

OF BRITISH NEWTS 225 

BIRD ROOSTS AND ROUTES 23 1 



JOURNAL ESSAYS 



ENJOYING LIFE 

I. 

June, 1914. — When I awoke, a glance towards the 
window told me that outside it had already happened 
— the sun was up ! humming along through a cloudless 
sky full of bees and skylarks. I shut my eyes and 
buried my nose in the pillow — awake sufficiently to 
realize that another great day had dawned for me 
while I slept. 

I lay still for a moment in luxurious anticipation 
and listened to a tiny joy, singing within like the 
voice of a girl in the distance, until at last great waves 
of happiness roared through my heart like sea-horses. 
I jumped out of bed, flung on my dressing-gown, and 
went off across the meadow to bathe in the stream. In 
the water I plunged, and struggled and kicked with a 
sensuous delight in its coldness and in every contrac- 
tion of a muscle, glad to be nude and clean and cool 
among the dragonflies and trout. I clambered to a 
rock in midstream on which I rested in a moment of 
expansion, relaxed in every tissue. The current 

3 



4 ENJOYING LIFE 

rocked one foot in the water, and the sun made every 
cell in my body vibrate. Upstream, a dipper sang 
. . . and surely nothing but happiness could ever 
enter life again ! Neither the past nor the future 
existed for me any more, but only the glorious and all- 
absorbing present. I put my whole being into the 
immediate ticking hour with its sixty minutes of 
precious life, and catching each pearl drop as it fell, 
said : " Now my happiness is complete, and now, and 
now." I lay thus for I know not how long, centuries 
perhaps, for down in the silent well of our existence 
time is not reckoned by the clock, nor our abiding joy 
in idle, obstinate words. Then I rubbed down with a 
hard towel — how I loved my cool, pink skin ! — and 
stood a moment in the shade of the pine trees, still 
unembarrassed by a single demoralizing garment. I 
was free, immaculate, untouched by anything coarser 
than the soft morning air around and the moss in the 
turf that supported the soles of my feet. 

In the afternoon, I strode over the hills in a spirit 
of burning exultation. The moors rolled to the sea 
inhnitely far and the sea to the horizon infinitely 
wide. I opened both arms and tried to embrace the 
immensity of that windswept space through sheer love 
of it. The wind roared past my ears and through my 
hair. Overhead a herring gull made use of the air 
currents and soared on motionless wings. Verily, the 
flight of a gull is as magnificent as the Andes ! No 



ENJOYING LIFE 5 

other being save myself was in sight. If I had chanced 
to meet someone I should have greeted him with the 
question that was stinging the tip of my tongue, 
"What does it all mean and what do you think?" 
And he, of course, after a moment's puzzled reflection, 
would have answered : " It means nout, tho' I think us 
could do with a change of Government." But so 
excited as to be heedless of his reply, I should have 
followed up, in the grand manner, with : " Whence do 
we come and whither do we go ?" or " Tell me where 
have you lived, what countries have you seen ? Which 
is your favourite mountain? Do you like thunder- 
storms or sunsets best ? How many times have you 
been in love, and what about God ?" 

At night, I turned homewards, flushed and excited 
with the day's life, going to bed unwillingly at last 
and even depressed because the day was at an end 
and I must needs put myself into a state of uncon- 
sciousness while the earth itself is never asleep, but 
always spins along amid the stars with its precious 
human freightage. To lose a single minute of con- 
scious life in sleep seemed a real loss ! 

II. 

Jtme^ 1914. — I like all things which are swift or im- 
mense — lightning, Popocatapetl, London, Roosevelt ! 

So, anyhow, I like to think in periods of ebullience 
when wind and sun beat down upon the face and the 



6 ENJOYING LIFE 

blood races along the arteries. We live in an age of 
hustle and speed. We sweep from one end of the 
country to the other by rail, 'plane, and motor, and 
the quidnunc querulously complains, " Too much rush- 
ing about nowadays and too little thinking." Yet 
does he think we ought to remain at home arranging 
the Cosmos with Lotze or William James, while 
Hamel gets into an aeroplane on the neighbouring 
heath and shows us how to loop the loop ? Must I be 
improving my mind with sociological ruminations 
while the herring fleet is ready to take me out to the 
deep sea? The speed, ferocity, and dash of the 
London street full of cars, and strenuous, sleek, top- 
hatted gentlemen and raddled women, is most exhil- 
arating. Londoners must enjoy a perpetual exhilara- 
tion. Like mountain air, I suspect that the stinks of 
petrol and horse-dung get into the blood. There may 
be a little mountain sickness at first, but the system 
soon adapts itself. On the first day of my arrival in 
London, as the train moved over the roofs of the 
squalid tenements in the environs of Waterloo and 
round about the great dome of St. Paul's, its cross 
reaching up into the sky like a great symbolic X, I 
kept thinking to myself that here was the greatest city 
in the world, and that here again was I, in it — one of 
its five millions of inhabitants. I said so to myself 
aloud and whistled low. Already I was in love with 
London's dirt and grandeur, and by the time I had 



ENJOYING LIFE 7 

reached the Strand I plunged like a man who cannot 
swim. After all, only Shakespeare could stand on the 
top of Mont Blanc and not lose his spiritual equi- 
librium. 

III. 

June, 1914. — But it is not always possible to be 
living in the heights. And life in the plains is 
often equally furious. We can climb to peaks in 
Darien without ever leaving our armchair. Wc may 
be swimming the Hellespont as we light a cigarette. 
Some of the tiniest outward incidents in life, in 
appearance as harmless as cricket balls, may be 
actually as explosive as bombs. That little, scarcely 
audible thing — a kiss — may shatter the fortress of the 
heart with the force of a 15-inch gun. A melody in 
music — one of Bach's fugues or the " Unfinished 
Symphony " of Schubert — may, in a few bars, create 
a bouleversement, sweep us out into the high seas past 
all our usual anchorages and leave us there alone to 
struggle with a new destiny. And who cannot recall 
— some there be, I think, who, with delightful 
preciosity, collect them in the memory — those silent, 
instantaneous flashes of collusion with beauty, of 
which even the memory so electrifies the emotions that 
no mental analysis of them is ever made. The intellect 
is knocked out in the first round. We can simply 
catalogue them without comment — e.g., a girl leaping 
and running into the sea to bathe ; those blue butter- 



8 ENJOYING LIFE 

flies and thyme flowers (which Richard Jefferies loved 
with an almost feminine tenderness); the nude body 
of a child of four; a young red-topped larch cone; a 
certain smile, a pressure of the hand, an unresolved 
inflexion of a voice. 

IV. 

June^ igi4. — Life pursues me like a fury. Every- 
where, at all times, I am feeling, thinking, hoping, 
hating, loving, cheering. It is impossible to escape. 

I once sought refuge in a deserted country church- 
yard, where the gravestones stood higgledy-piggledy 
among the long grass, their inscriptions almost 
obliterated by moss and time. " Here," said I, " it will 
be cold and lifeless and I can rest." I wanted to be 
miserable, dull, and unresponsive. With difficulty I 
read an inscription expressing the sorrow of a father 
and mother in 1701 for the loss of their beautiful 
daughter Joan, aged 21. I read others, but the most 
pathetic barely amused me. I was satisfactorily in 
different. These people, I said sardonically, had Uvea 
and suffered so long ago that even their sorrows were 
petrified. Parents' grief in 1701 is simply a piece of 
palaeontology. So I passed on, content to be unmo- 
lested, thinking I had escaped. But beside the old 
graves were a few recent ones with fresh flowers upon 
them; across the road in the schoolroom the children 
began to sing, and up at the farm, I then recalled, the 



ENJOYING LIFE g 

old folk, Mr. and Mrs. Brooks, were waiting for the 
call; all of them beneath the shadow of the church 
tower whose clock-face watched the generations come 
and go and come again to lie beneath the shadow of 
the yews. I saw the procession of human life, genera- 
tion after generation, pass through the village down 
through the ages, and though all had been silent 
before, I heard now the roar of existence sweeping 
through the churchyard as loudly as in Piccadilly. I 
jumped from peak to peak of thought — from human 
life on the planet to the planet itself; the earth fell 
away from my feet, and far below was the round world 
whole — a sphere among other spheres in the planetary 
system bound up by the laws of evolution and motion. 
As I hung aloft at so great a height and in an atmo- 
sphere, so cold and rare, I shivered at the immensity of 
the universe of which I formed a part : for the moment 
a colossal stage fright seized me, I longed to cease to 
be, to vanish in complete self-annihilation. But only 
for a moment : then gathering the forces of the soul as 
every man must and does at times of crisis, I leapt 
upon the rear of the great occasion before it was too 
late, crying : The world is a ship, on an unknown and 
dangerous commission. But I for my part, as a silly 
shipboy, will stand on the ratlines and cheer. I left 
the churchyard almost hilarious ! 



10 ENJOYING LIFE 

V. 

]uiie, /p/^.— "Dans litt^rature," said M. Taine, 
" j'aime tout." I would shake his hand for saying 
that and add : *' In life, Monsieur, as well." All things 
attract me equally. I cannot concentrate. I am ready 
to do anything, go anywhere, think anything, read 
anything. Wherever I hitch my waggon I am con- 
fident of an adventurous ride. Somebody says, 
'' Come and hear some Wagner." I am ready to go. 
Another, " I say, they are going to ring the bull " — 
and who wants to complete his masterpiece or count 
his money when they are going to ring the bull ? I 
will go with you to Norway, Switzerland, Jericho, 
Timbuctoo. Talk to me about the Rosicrucians or the 
stomach of a flea and I will listen to you. Tell mc 
that tlie Chelsea Power Station is as beautiful as the 
Parthenon at Athens and I'll believe you. Every- 
thing is beautiful, even the ugly — why did Whistler 
paint the squalor of the London streets, or Brangwyn 
the gloom of a steam-crane ? To subscribe to any one 
particular profession, mode of life, doctrine, philo- 
sophy, opinion, or enthusiasm, is to cut oneself off 
from all the rest — I subscribe to all. With the whole 
world before you, beware lest the machinery of educa- 
tion seizes hold of the equipotential of your youth and 
grinds you out the finished product ! You were a 
human being to start with — noii\ you are only a 



ENJOYING LIFE n 

soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor. Leonardo da Vinci, 
racked with frustrate passion after the universal, is 
reported to have declared that only to do one thing 
and only to know one thing was a disgrace, no less. 
" We should not be able to say of a man, ' He is a 
mathematician,' or a ' preacher,* or * eloquent ' ; but 
that he is ' a gentleman.' That universal quality alone 
pleases me." (Pascal.) 

" The works of man don't interest me much," an 
enthusiast in Natural History once said to me, *' I 
prefer the works of God." Unctuous wretch ! He was 
one of those forlorn creatures with a carefully ordered 
mind, his information and opinions written out in 
indelible ink, and pigeon-holed for easy reference. 
He had never shrunk to realize all he did not know — 
he knew all the things worth knowing. He never 
shuddered to reflect upon the limitations of a single 
point of view — other folk were simply wrong. He was 
scarcely one to understand the magnanimous phrase 
of the French, " Tout comprendre c'est tout par- 
donner." Other folk were either good or bad. 

VI. 

]uly^ IQ14. — Perhaps too great an enthusiasm 
exhausts the spirit Love kills. I know it. The love 
of one's art or profession, passion for another's soul, 
for one's children, sap the life blood and hurry us on 
to the grave. I know a man who killed himself with a 



12 ENJOYING LIFE 

passion for dragon-flies — a passion ending in 
debauchery : and debauchery of books, lust of know- 
ledge is as fatal as any other kind. 

I know it. But I don't care. Your minatory fore- 
finger is of no avail. Already I am too far gone. 
Those days are ancient history now when I endured 
the torture of an attempt to reclaim myself. I even 
reduced myself to so little as a grain a day by reading 
Kant and talking to entomologists. But no permanent 
cure was ever effected. 

Once, I recall, I sat down to study zoology, because 
I thought it would be sober and dull. How foolish ! 
Rousseau said he cooled his brain by dissecting a 
moss. But I know of few more blood-curdling achieve- 
ments than the thoroughly successful completion of a 
difficult dissection. 

Then I immersed myself in old books and forgotten 
learning. I had the idea that a big enough tumulus 
of dust and parchments over my head would be a big 
enough stopper for the joy of life. I became an 
habitue of the British Museum Reading Room and 
rummaged among the dead books as Lord Rosebery 
calls them, but only to find that they were buried alive. 
Any unfortunate devil received the cataract of super- 
latives I poured upon him at the discovery of some 
lively memoirs of i6oi. One of my favourite books 
became the " Encyclopaedia Britannica." I read its 
learned articles till my eyes ached and my head swam. 



ENJOYING LIFE 13 

The sight of those huge tomes made me tremble with 
a lover's impatience. I could have wept in thinking 
of all the facts I should never know and of all those I 
had forgotten ! I grew to love facts and learning with 
the same passion as I had loved life. My enthusiasm 
was not quenched. It was only diverted. I tried to 
laugh myself out of it. But it was no use being 
cynical. For I found that no fact, no piece of infor- 
mation about this world, is greater or less than 
another, but that all are equal as the angels. So with 
the utmost seriousness I looked up any word I 
thought upon — pins, nutmegs, Wallaby — it's a terrible 
game ! — and gorged ! I winced at nothing. I 
rejected nothing. I raked over even the filth, deter- 
mined that no nastiness should escape my mind : I 
studied syphilis and politics, parasitology and crime, 
and, like Sir Thomas Browne, soon discovered that 1 
could digest a salad gathered in a churchyard as 
easily as one in a garden. 

VII. 

July, igi4- — I have long since given up this idea of 
hiding away from life in a museum or a library. Life 
seeks you out wherever you are. For the diarist, the 
most commonplace things of daily life are of absorb- 
ing interest. Each day, the diarist finds himself born 
into a world as strange and beautiful as the dead 
world of the day before. The diarist lives on the 



14 ENJOYING LIFE 

globe for ail the world as if he lodged on the slopes of 
a mountain, and unlike most mountain dwellers, he 
never loses his sense of awe at his situation. Life is 
vivid to him. " And so to bed," writes Mr. Secretary 
Pepys, a hundred times in his diary, and we may be 
sure that each time he joined Mrs. Pepys beneath the 
coverlet he felt that the moment which marked the 
end of his wonderful day was one deserving careful 
record. 

A man, shut up in a dark room, can still be living a 
tense and eager life. Cut off from sight and sound, 
he still can sit in his chair and listen to the beating of 
his own heart — that wonderful muscle inside the cage 
of the thorax, working and moving like some indepen- 
dent entity, some other person^ upon whom the favour 
of our daily life depends. The human body, what a 
wonderful mechanism it is ! It never ceases to 
astonish me that anyone — on waking up in this world 
and finding himself in possession of a body — ^his only 
bit of real property — should be satisfied when he has 
clothed and fed it. One would think that the infant's 
first articulated request would be for a primer of 
physiology. 

I have often wondered how a beautiful woman 
regards her body. The loveliness which I must seek 
outside myself sleeps on " the ivories of her pure 
members." She carries the incommunicable secret in 
herself, in the texture of her own skin, and the contour 



ENJOYING LIFE 15 

of her own breasts. She is a guardian of the hidden 
treasure which fills the flowers and lives in the sunset. 
How must it be to possess so burning a secret hidden 
even to the possessor ? What must she think on look- 
ing into the glass ? 

I look into the glass, and am baffled by the intoler- 
able strangeness that that face is mine, that I am I, 
that my name is Barbellion. It is easy, too fatally 
easy, to continue exploring the recesses of one's own 
life and mind day by day, making fresh discoveries, 
opening up new tracts, and on occasion getting a 
sight of blue mountain ranges in the distance whither 
we endeavour to arrive. 

VIIL 
July, igi4. — Life is beautiful and strange. Too 
beautiful, too strange. I sometimes envy those folk 
whom I see daily accepting life without question or 
wonderment as a homely fireside affair — except of 
course for some unusual places like the Niagara Falls 
only to be visited on a holiday, or for some unpleasant 
tragedies they read about in the newspapers. It 
would be useless to put to them the ultimate and 
staggering question why anything exists at all — 
" Why not sheer negation ?" — to the folk who find 
their circumstances so dull that they have to play with 
bat and ball to fend off ennui, who are always in 
search of what is known as a " pastime," or who invite 



i6 ENJOYING LIFE 

children to stay with them " to keep them alive " as 
they explain — as if there were not enough weeping, 
wondering, and laughing to be done in this blessed 
world to keep us all alive and throbbing ! Life has 
ceased to be an intoxication for them. It is just a 
mild illusion in which they attend to the slugs in the 
strawberry beds and get in that extra hundredweight 
of coal, accepting the bountiful flow of still, calm, 
happy days as their due, and like spoilt children 
feeling bored with them. Yet confront these dormice 
with a slice of life and they will blink and scamper 
off. Show them a woman suckling a baby or a dirty 
man drinking beer, and they will raise their eyebrows 
or blanch. There is no limit to their fear of living. 
They are nervous of their appetites and instincts — 
they will not eat themselves into a bilious attack nor 
smoke themselves into a weak heart. They fear either 
to love or to hate unreservedly. Men like Baudelaire 
and Villon terrify them, liner disasters and earth- 
quakes send them trembling to their knees and books 
of devotion. They will not brazen life out. Let them 
come out of their houses and seek courage in the 
thunder of the surf on the seashore, or amid the tall 
majestic columns of the strong Scots pines, whose 
lower branches spread down and outwards graciously 
like friendly hands to frightened children. How many 
times have I sought sanctuary among the tall Scots 
pines ! 



ENJOYING LIFE 17 

IX. 

July^ 1914. — Courage, I know, is necessary. Let us 
pray for courage, if we are to regard without flinching 
our amazing situation on this island planet where we 
are marooned. Amid the island's noise and rapture, 
struggle, and vicissitude, we must wrestle with the 
forces of Nature for our happiness. True happiness is 
the spoils of conquest seized out of the clutches of 
furious life. We must pay for it with a price. That 
which is given away contains no value. Tall cliffs, a 
dancing sea and the sun glorious perhaps. Yes, but 
simple enjoyment of that kind is a Pyrrhic victory. 
The real victor must exult in the menace of two 
hundred feet of sheer, perpendicular rock surface ; and 
when he bathes, remember that the sea has talons and 
that the glorious sun itself, what is it? — a globe of 
incandescent heat, compared with which the blast 
furnaces of Sheffield are only warm, and around 
which our earth ever keeps on its dizzy mothlike 
circle. 

I am far from believing that the world is a paradise 
of sea-bathing and horse-exercise as R.L.S. said. That 
is a piece of typical Stevensonian bravura. It is a 
rare gymnasium to be sure. But it is also a blood- 
spattered abattoir, a theatre of pain, an anabasis of 
travail, a Calvary and a Crucifixion. But therein lies 
its extraordinary fascination — in those strange anti- 



1 8 ENJOYING LIFE 

theses of comedy and tragedy, joy and sorrow, beauty 
and ugliness. It is the sock one day and the buskin 
the next. Marriage sheet and shroud are inextricably 
interwoven. Like a beautiful and terrible mistress, 
the world holds me its devoted slave. She flouts me, 
but I love her still. She is cruel, but still I love her. 
My love for her is a guilty love — for the voluptuous 
curves of the Devonshire moors, for the bland 
benignity of the sun smiling alike on the just and on 
the unjust, for the sea which washes in a beautiful 
shell or a corpse with the same meditative indif- 
ference. 

There are many things I ought to scowl upon. But 
I cannot. The spell is too great. I surprise myself 
sometimes with my callous exuberation at the triumph 
of brute force, at some of the grotesque melodramas 
engineered by Fate (for in spite of Thomas Hardy 
and Greek tragedy, Fate is often but a sorry artist), 
at the splendid hypocrisy of many persons even in 
high places or when I learn that a whole army has 
been "cut to pieces," I rub my hands murmuring in 
ironical delight, " It is simply colossal." Marlowe, I 
believe, drew Barrabas out of sheer love of his wicked- 
ness. Shakespeare surely exulted in the unspeakable 
tragedy of King Lear. 

I have been too long now in love with this wicked 
old earth to wish to change one jot or one tittle of it. 
\ am loath to surrender even the Putumayo atrocities. 



ENJOYING LIFE 19 

Let me have Crippen as well as Father Damien, 
Heliogabalus as well as Marcus Aurelius. Liars and 
vagabonds are the salt of the earth. Who wants 
Benvenuto Cellini to tell the truth ? What missionary 
spirit feels tempted to reclaim Aretino or Laurence 
Sterne ? The man who wrote of " the pitiful end " of 
Marlowe killed in a tavern brawl bores me, with his 
peevishness. It is silly to repine because Keats died 
young or because Poe drank himself to death. This 
kind of jejune lament from the people who live in 
garden cities soon becomes very monotonous indeed. 
Tragedy and comedy, I thought we were all agreed, 
are the warp and woof of life, and if we have agreed 
to accept life and accept it fully, let us stand by our 
compact and whoop like cowboys on the plains. Who 
wants to be pampered with divine or miraculous inter- 
vention ? We are too proud. Let the world run on. 
We can manage. If you suffer at least you live, said 
Balzac. So Heine and Schubert out of their great 
sorrows wrote their little songs, and out of Amiel's life 
of wasted opportunity came the Journal to give the lie 
to those who do not hold it to be as much a triumph 
to fail as to succeed, to despair as to win through 
with joy. 



CRYING FOR THE MOON* 

I. 

igiS (Summer). — For the past few days I have been 
suffering from a horrible feeling of compression. I 
have been struggling in vain to embrace a larger 
sphere of intellectual activity — to expand in spite of 
the stubborn elasticity of my mental bag which more 
than once has approached bursting point. 

The affair began with some illustrated booklets on 
trips to Norway, wherein I saw pictures of beautiful 
places the very existence of which had never before 
entered my consciousness. 

" How ghastly," I said to myself almost in anguish, 
" that here I am forced to go on day by day frittering 
away my life as a museum assistant in London — in 
England — when all the planet beyond remains unex- 
plored by me." Surely it is a perfectly natural desire 
in a human being on first fully awakening to full 
consciousness of his amazing situation to set out forth- 
with to explore the globe? For my part I became 
eager — too eager for my peace of mind — to explore 
every nook and cranny on the face of the globe, so that 
before death came I could say that I had had the 

* Reprinted from T]ie Forum. 
21 



22 CRYING FOR THE MOON 

intelligent interest and curiosity at least to inspect it 
superficially. 

But I did not wish to end there. After traversing 
the earth and seeing all manner of mountains, rivers, 
plains, deserts, and faunas, all manner of peoples and 
of human lives, and experiencing all manner of 
climates, I was big with desire to settle down quietly 
and study — to fill out my superficial survey with all 
the available human knowledge, to make myself 
acquainted with everything that men had ever found 
out about the earth. 

Zoology, my favorite science, of course offered itself 
at once as a point at which to begin. I longed for 
more zoology. Yet my zest recoiled upon itself when 
I recognized how hopelessly incapable my brain was 
of sustaining the avalanche of new facts and ideas I 
wished to cast upon it. I turned over the pages of the 
Zoologische Anzeiger and read a few papers greedily. 
Then realizing that there were fifty or sixty more 
papers in it of equal interest and fifty or sixty more 
volumes of the Anzeiger ^ all containing for me, a 
zoologist, researches and studies of deep fascination, 
I turned over a few more pages listlessly, read a few 
more titles, and closed the book. ... It was no use. 
I must curb my appetite, 

I sat back in my chair and mused. . . . Zoology 
alone was sufficient to baulk my puny endeavours. 
How hopeless it all seemed ! Man is given the hunger 
for knowledge, but not the capacity in nerve cells to 



CRYING FOR THE MOON 23 

gratify it. He is " avid of all dominion and all- 
mightiness," but is forced to spend his days as a 
museum assistant. I am not capable of doing much 
else. Yet I want not only unlimited zoology, but 
astronomy, physics, chemistry, and all the sciences. 
I want to explore all knowledge. I have developed 
again all the accursed thirst for knowledge which in 
my early days undermined my health and spoilt my 
eyesight. Surely it is a perfectly natural desire in a 
human being on waking up in a wonderful world to 
proceed at once to find out all that is known about it 
to date ! 

My sails fluttered loosely in the winds of desire for 
a moment, then I was caught up and blown on into 
fresh excesses. 

This time it was the picture of a beautiful woman I 
noticed in the morning paper. The beautiful neck, 
the perfectly bowed lips, and the grieving eyes simply 
intoxicated me. I went on glancing at the news, every 
now and then returning to rest my eyes on Lady 
Winifred Gore, experiencing every time that I did it 
a very rueful petulance. What manner of man could 
he possibly be, I said, who would dare, perhaps non- 
chalantly, to seek in marriage the hand of such a 
divinity? I became envious of the fortunate gentle- 
man, whoever he should be. I did not like to face the 
obvious fact that such a prize could never be mine. I 
knew that even if it could, such a prize falls to the lot 
of a man but once. Yet there are a thousand beautiful 



24 CRYING FOR THE MOON 

women with beautiful souls whom I could never know 
and never love. 

The glamour of her noble birth, I think, fired my 
imagination and made me think of social vortices out- 
side my knowledge. I should like to be an aristocrat 
or a coal-miner for a while. How difficult it seems to 
remain content with my own small portion, my 
own little circumscribed life and the dire necessity of 
having to remain myself, of having to see life always 
with my own spectacles all through life's tour. I 
desire to have the experiences of a hundred different 
lives in different classes, circles, professions, trades, 
occupations, to test and try every kind of life, to sum 
the series of human experiences. 

11. 

Coming home in the omnibus, I caught the London 
fever. So many people stimulated my lust for life. I 
obtained a splendid exhilaration from watching the 
London streets. The bustle and furore invigorated 
me. I longed to dash down in the middle of it and go 
the pace. Here was a man in a silk hat and evening 
dress stepping into his car from his club, here a man 
selling mechanical toys, here some laughing girls 
dashing across the road and enjoying themselves, 
here a woman with paralysis begging, and here a 
newsvendor telling me of a " Dramatic Story — Lost 
Pearl Necklace," while always everywhere I saw people 
walking, riding, driving in cabs and 'buses, hurrying. 



CRYING FOR THE MOON 25 

talking, frowning, smiling as if the whole world were 
tacitly engaged upon the same mysterious undertak- 
ing. I felt like climbing down and beseeching some 
one to tell me what it was. 

In the evening I went to the Palace to see Anna 
Pavlova dance. I was amazed not so much at the 
dancing but at the fact that here was a woman — 
strange, delicate, lissome, spirituelle — leading a life 
quite unsuspected and unimagined by me — a life con- 
sisting of the daily pleasure of beautiful eurhythmic 
motions, and the satisfaction of delighting crowd after 
crowd who came night after night and clapped and 
sent her bouquets. 

Oh ! how I sympathize with the child who keeps 
saying to its mother : " I want to be a soldier," " I 
wish I were an engine-driver," "I want to be an 
actor." It is only when we grow up that we are 
fools enough to go on our way satisfied with our 
own little perspectives. I wanted to be Anna for 
a night or two. I wanted to luxuriate in the still- 
ness which comes upon an audience when the orator 
waits a few moments before continuing his words. 
I envied Pasteur the moment when he rushed out of 
his laboratory crying, " Tout est trouve." I mused 
upon the feelings of a literary genius at the great 
moment when he writes " Finis " at the end of a book 
which, with the self-knowledge of genius, he knows to 
be a masterpiece. 

I am passing through the world swiftly and have 



26 CRYING FOR THE MOON 

only time to live my own life. I am cut off by my own 
limitations and environment from knowing much or 
understanding much. I know nothing of literature 
and the drama; I have but little ear for music. I do 
not understand art. All these things are closed to me. 
I am passing swiftly along the course of my life with 
many others whom I shall never meet. How many 
dear friends and kindred spirits remain undiscovered 
among that number ? There is no time for anything. 
Everything and everyone is swept along in the 
hustling current. Oh ! to sun ourselves awhile in the 
water meadows before dropping over the falls ! The 
real tragedies in this world are not the things which 
happen to us, but the things which don't happen. 

Life and the world to me were a royal banquet at 
which I could have only a snack. I must needs see 
this beautiful earth for a few short years from one 
centre of intelligence and one viewpoint — my own. 
What man can ever know what it is to be a woman — 
particularly a beautiful woman ? We are born male 
and female, and as we are born so we die. And what 
of those extraordinary beings we read of in the news- 
papers whose existence till we happen to meet one 
of them seems to be incredible fiction ? In how great 
a measure must our conception of life fail in reality in 
proportion as we omit these ? 

The imagination helps a man a little to get outside 
the limits of his own existence. But the imagination 
gives only a ghost-like reflection of actualities — 



CRYING FOR THE MOON 2; 

sufficient however to inform us clearly of the poverty 
of the experiences which we sense — as few and poor 
as our finite, isolated natures let through the veil of 
the flesh. Books help a little, but experience through 
books is second hand. Conversation with all manner 
of people helps a little. But it brings us only know- 
ledge by report. 

III. 

Even SO; there are things which are forever lost to 
human experience — things of which we can never read 
in books nor hear by the report of a friend, and which 
we scarcely dare to imagine — lost continents (Lemuria 
and Atlantis), lost masterpieces (the books burnt at 
Alexandria), and lost personalities. How can a man 
recover to the satisfaction of a tingling curiosity his 
own babyhood and childhood, or the comedies and 
tragedies, the personalities of and the accidents to his 
own immediate forbears ? Some men cannot recollect 
their own father and mother. Few men I trow show 
much desire to discuss their grandmothers. 

When a man grows older, particularly, he is so 
absorbed in the present that he becomes disloyal to 
the past and literally forgets himself. He no longer 
remembers what it is to be a child or a youth ; he has 
forgotten most of the facts and incidents in his life 
which moulded him and made him what he is. All 
these things are lost — utterly lost, as few other things 
can be. And when he dies, even if he be a great man 



28 CRYING FOR THE MOON 

and biographers jostle each other in the race to turn 
out volumes on his life, not a library of books can 
possibly recreate a personality or materialize a spirit. 
Life flows away like a river into the sands of time. 
You cannot catch it in a sieve, nor bottle sunshine. 
As Herakleitus first said, " We can never bathe in the 
same river twice." 

IV. 

How I loathe those happy folk — there are millions 
of them, all detestable — who with a terrible self-com- 
placency go on revolving around the centres of their 
own souls, perfectly satisfied with that situation in 
life to which — to use their own smug phrase — it has 
pleased God to call them; people who have no envy 
and no malice, who have never coveted their neigh- 
bour's ox nor his wife, and who believe out of 
ignorance and lack of imagination rather than out of 
conceit that their own life contains everything to be 
desired. They are fat, greasy, and smug. But their 
smugness is not the philosophical smugness of Marcus 
Aurelius. They have no philosophy. They are too 
happy and pleased with themselves to need one. 
Marcus Aurelius developed his philosophy of resigna- 
tion because he feared to desire fearlessly the things 
he knew he would desire in vain. He put forth his 
tentacles and drew them in again. He shrank from 
life, not because he did not love it, but because he 
loved it too well; not because he had no desires, but 



CRYING FOR THE MOON 29 

because he had too many. It was his reaction, as a 
biologist would say. The other people have no reac- 
tion because life gives them no stimulus. Theirs is 
not resignation after a struggle; it is contentment 
without one. Only very occasionally do the self-com- 
placent harbour a suspicion that possibly all is not 
well, just for a few fleeting seconds while some un- 
pleasant person like myself pulls them by the nose, 
making the ugly suggestion that perhaps they could 
not really write a novel as well as the other man they 
criticize, that perhaps life would be the tiniest bit 
fuller if they understood art or loved music, that 
doing the thing that is nearest is easy and always dull, 
that their cherished views on Church and State after 
all may be a little questionable, that things may not 
be what they seem, that life to some is difficult, that 
men do starve and commit murder and rape, that God 
may not always be in His Heaven nor everything 
right with the world. 

V. 

Another type of being I have in mind falls neither 
within that of the self-complacent nor the philo- 
sophically resigned. I mean the type of those 
neurotic intellectuals who welcomed in Baudelaire a 
new frisson. How could they be capable of such 
ennui — as if they had sounded the very depths and 
soared to the very heights and compassed every- 
thing ! They assumed that because their fierce 



30 CRYING FOR THE MOON 

thirst had dried up their own wells, life held no 
more water — I could understand a complaint that 
they were in such case forbidden to drink any 
more. They were like men dying of inanition in 
a land of plenty or of thirst in a well-watered 
country. Lucky for them that although like 
petulant children who had finished their meal they 
indeed cried for more cake, yet they were ignorant of 
the cupboard stores and fondly imagined there was 
no more cake in the whole wide world ! 

VI. 

As for myself, I am neither bored, self-complacent 
nor resigned. I am a plunger. I cannot timidly sigh, 
" Thy will be done." Better surely to die spluttering 
beneath a pile of vain hopes than with the sickly 
imperturbable smile of the comfortable person. It is 
better to have hoped in vain than never to have hoped 
at all. 

This afternoon I have had tea in an old-fashioned 
garden of an old-fashioned Hertfordshire inn. While 
I was drinking tea the innkeeper came out from a fowl 
run and turning round toward me slammed the gate, 

calling, " Are you getting on air ?" Silence. He 

had caught in the wicket-gate the neck of a fowl 
which had followed him. It was dead at once, and he 
handed it over to the boy to pluck. No mistake, this 
is a " jolly vivid " world, with battle, murder and 
sudden death, assassinations and prosaic starvation; 



CRYING FOR THE MOON 31 

and a fowl in Hertfordshire killed in a moment 
between a gate and plucked ready for cooking ! 

Shortly after leavmg the inn, I walked up the hill 
and came to a held full of acres of poppies. The sun 
was going down and the gipsies slept. Of a truth a 
"jolly vivid world!" To plunge into that scarlet 
crowd, to bathe in the colour, to crush the crisp green 
stalks between the teeth — to drown ! 

How well I recollect years ago as a little boy waking 
up one morning to find, for the first time in my life, 
the snow covering the ground. I was ravished ! I 
went out into the field at the back of the house and 
for a moment regarded the snow, immobile, with a 
pinched, serious little face. Then I gave way, 
stretched myself out flat on it and rolled over and 
over and over gurgling with joy. The next day I was 
home from school with a touch of bronchitis, and my 
face was perhaps a little paler and more wondering. 
But I have burnt my fingers often since — in a field of 
poppies, in a library or among girls — plunging 
always. Of a truth a " jolly vivid " world ! and full 
of luscious, ruddy things. 

I am acutely sensitive to the fact that others are 
tasting more of them than I. 

VII. 
I have just been wandering about looking gloomily 
out of the windows of my prison of flesh and wishing 
to be whisked away like a spirit into all kinds of 



32 CRYING FOR THE MOON 

places, lives, knowledge, and love. Being a separate 
and isolated creature makes me sick at heart. I am 
not content with living my own life. I could use up 
fifty lives at least. 

I should like to accompany others in living their 
lives — particularly the lives of those whom I love. I 
could feel all the pain at parting from friends in a 
new way. This centrifugal force of the spirit must lie 
at the bottom of the little pain felt in saying " good- 
bye" even to acquaintances. Something snaps when 
we bid " adieu " to a man we know — or even when we 
leave a tramcar or a railway-carriage after making ten 
minutes' silent acquaintanceship with five or six dull, 
uninteresting yet human beings. Partir^ c'est toujours 
mourir un pen. 

I can see the gentleman with red cheeks and large 
biceps flinging at this the epithet " sentimental," as if 
he were flinging a stone. But he does not under- 
stand. How should he ? Large biceps and red 
cheeks are not without their disadvantages. I do 
affirm that the most commonplace farewells for me 
focus the attention all at once upon the mystery and 
magic of our existence and separated lives. It comes 
as an abrupt reminder of our ignorance of the future 
and our dependence upon outside forces. We feel a 
helplessness as creatures swept across a limitless ocean 
by currents, each alone in his own little boat, even 
though the boats keep together for a while and we 
shout to each other across the water. After a day of 



CRYING FOR THE MOON 33 

homely pleasures, when we have been immersed in the 
little soothing commonplaces of daily life, we are at 
once made to confront the great mystery which lies 
everywhere around us and which — look where we will 
— is ever ready to catch the eye and compel the 
attention — as soon as it is time to get up and say 
"good-bye." We may try to avoid it as much as we 
can — we may smoke a cigarette and drink a glass 
of wine, play cards, and tell a funny story ; but we all 
know, though we never mention it, that each of us has 
a skeleton in his closet — the skeleton of Death and the 
Unknown. 

VIII. 

A dark night with stars but no moon, tall trees — 
dusky gaunt forms — on each side of a hill road. 
Everything is silent. I feel solitary and pleasurably 
sad. Suddenly a train dashes along the valley below. 
I look over the hedge and gaze at the lighted windows 
of the train as it sails around a bend in the valley like 
a phosphorescent caterpillar. . . . Who are those 
that are travelling in it and whither are they going ? 
I do not know. God knows, I suppose, but I must 
continue my solitary way, catching sight now and 
then of a cottage window light in between the trees. 
Such window lights summon an idle tear from I know 
not where. 

Everywhere one can see human love trying to over- 

3 



34 CRYING FOR THE MOON 

come time, distance, and separation, trying to draw 
together the threads of isolated lives. If I enter a 
friend's house, I see on the mantelpiece photographs 
of folk 1 met last week hundreds of miles away — they 
are cousins or relations or friends. I say to myself 
with an infinite relish for the mysteries of time and 
space, " Dear me, last week, this time, I was hundreds 
of miles away" — in Timbuctoo or the Andaman 
Islands, wherever they are. 

After a day spent in London — in "all the uproar 
and the press," in 'bus riding and train catching, with 
a literary friend at lunch and tea in an A.B.C. shop 
with all its variegated life — I arrive toward evening 
at a village thirty miles in the country and enter a 
baker's shop for a loaf of bread for my supper. There 
is the baker, fat, bald, and sleepy — waiting for me. 
He has been waiting there all day — for weeks past — 
perhaps all his life ! He hands me the loaf, our 
courses touch and then we sweep away again out into 
the infinite. What would he say if I told him his life 
was a beautiful parabolic curve ? 

Last year about this time, armed with a letter of 
introduction, I called upon a professor of zoology who 
happened to be out. I was inadvertently shown by 
the servant girl into a drawing-room where a little 
boy lay on a rug sound asleep, with his head framed 
in one arm and his curls hanging loosely down over 
his face. I looked down upon his little form 
and upon his face and marvelled. He never 



CRYING FOR THE MOON 35 

stirred and I stepped softly from the room and never 
saw him again. Life is full of such magic. Every 
such experience means a little bitter-sweet sorrow. 
For it means pain to be a separate lonely unit, a 
disrupted chip of the universe. The gregarious nature 
of man is not simply a fact of natural history. It is 
the expression of a deep religious desire for oneness 
in which alone we can sink down to rest. 

I nowhere obtained a more vivid impression of my 
own isolation than when walking the other evening in 
the country where I was staying, I turned toward 
home and caught sight of the little cottage up the 
road where I lodged. I noted the room with the 
open lattice window where I had been sleeping and 
where I was to sleep, and I considered how that at 
night when everything was in darkness and no one 
stirred all that there was of me would be found un- 
conscious m a bed, beneath that little roof, within 
that small cottage which stood beneath the stars like 
millions of other cottages scattered over the country- 
side. By day I was alive and moving about, my ego 
was radiating forth, absorbing, soaking up my 
environment so that I became a larger being with a 
larger ego. By night I shrank to a spot. The 
thought made me catch my breath. 

IX. 

The loneliness of life is sometimes appalling ! 
There is the loneliness known to most when in 
moments of exaltation a man feels genius stir within 



36 CRYING FOR THE MOON 

him like a child in the womb of its mother, and knows 
that he cannot express himself. He wishes to embrace 
the whole world and yet cannot stir a limb ; he wishes 
to tell the whole world his good tidings and draw it 
to himself, yet he cannot utter a sound. In all great 
crises we are alone. The greatest things are incom- 
municable. I was once walking on the sands by the 
sea when a great wave of joyfulness swept across me. 
I stood upon a rock and waved my stick about and 
sang. I wanted the sands to be crowded with a great 
male voice chorus — ^hundreds of thousands of men — 
so many that there should be no standing room for 
more. I imagined myself standing above them, a 
physical and musical Titan on the top of a high 
mountain as high as Mont Blanc, conducting with a 
baton as large as a barge pole. The breakers would 
boom an accompaniment, but the chorus would be 
heard above everything else and even God Himself 
would turn from schemes for new planets (and less 
hopeless ones than this) to fling a regret for injustice 
done to such spirited people ! 

So in the crises of pain you are alone. If you have 
a cold in the head you can tell your friend and he 
condoles with you. But if you develop an incurable 
disease, it is impossible for your closest friend to offer 
his paltry sympathy.* It would be impertinent for 

* See The Journal of a Disappointed Man, November 27th, 
1915. (More irony.) 
It may be explained here that after the destruction of the 



CRYING FOR THE MOON 37 

him to offer a remark when the mills of God have 
once caught you and begun to grind you out. It is 
an affair beyond man's scope. Man cannot presume 
on God. Similarly in crises of the heart. At the time 
you cannot utter your misery. And afterwards, you 
are glad to be finished with it, and so no one knows. 

But we are alone not only in crises. We are really 
alone in the ordinary thoughts and emotions of every 
day : the simplest movements of the soul are incom- 
municable. A recent writer says, and says truly, " By 
no Art may the Ego be made manifest even to itself." 
So that we are lonely even in ourselves and strangers 
to ourselves, so that I echo with enthusiasm Balzac's 
remark that nothing interested him so much as 
himself. 

X. 

There is a deep-lying desire in most of us to be 
immanent in all life. I regret I was not alive in the 
days of ancient Rome. To have been non-existent 
cind unconsidered in such great affairs stings me 
sharply ! I seem to be a sort of serious village idiot 
whose desire to help is viewed with smiles or friendly 

doctor's certificate described under this date, it became im- 
mediately necessary to obtain another as soon as conscription 
came into force. It is this second certificate that is mentioned 
subsequently {Ibid., p. 260), but its history, though clear in the 
Journal MS., was inadvertently omitted from the book as 
published.— Ed, 



38 CRYING FOR THE MOON 

tolerance, or else is simply ignored — an energetic fly 
on a great wheel, puling out remonstrances because he 
isn*t the engineer. I am piqued because I was not a 
witness of the gambollings of Dinosaurs and Ptero- 
dactyls. Yet I lay unthought of in the womb of a 
mother whose species was still unevolved. God does 
not appear to have taken me into consideration at all ! 
In fact it is hard to bring myself to believe that men 
lived so long ago in Rome, Carthage, Babylon, 
Nineveh, just as we are now alive, or that there ever 
really existed such things as Pterodactyls and 
Dinosaurs. I am taught to believe such things, but 
where is the man who really knows? "I wonder, by 
my troth, what you and I did till we loved. ..." I 
am in love with life and can hardly believe it, just as 
a man in love with a woman can scarcely believe that 
she was in the world before he knew her. We are in- 
formed that every reason is in favour of the earth 
being round, but no one has actually seen that it is 
round. We believe theoretically in the millions of 
beings who inhabit China, but the existence of so 
many people is part of no one's real knowledge. We 
are unable to realize truly the few millions of people 
that live with us in the city of London. No one but 
Jesus Christ could have wept over a whole town. The 
ordinary man's compassion is too little. If Xerxes 
really wept over his army, he was a great soul. 

The mind comprehends only the inmates of his own 

m 



CRYING FOR THE MOON 39 

drawing-room, his own household or his little circle 
of friends. That is the real world — even of the large- 
souled Mrs. Jellyby ! The world beyond — the 
heathen of the Dark Continent — must be accepted 
as a corollary. It is a little shock of surprise, not 
unmingled with regret, every time I leave home and 
wander abroad, to see thousands of other people like 
myself scurrying like rabbits over the earth*s surface. 
They upset my equilibrium. I come tumbling down 
into the guise of a mere unit of the population. As I 
near home once more, I grow big again — like Alice — 
until once again in the family circle I assume my 
original dimensions : very comfortable it is, too. 

The world is " so full of a number of things " — 
there are so many blades of grass, such a prodigious 
quantity of leaves on the trees and so many — far too 
many — stars in the sky. Their quantity depresses 
me. If there were but one of each sort it would be 
easy to understand the ingenuous enthusiasm of the 
man of science, who even as it is realizes and never 
ceases to insist that the study which a man may 
devote to but a single creature is infinite. How 
depressing ! 

XL 

Perhaps all our knowledge and experience is a 
stupendous dream. Matter may be non-existent and 
time and space categories in which to think, as those 
deep and entertaining men, the philosophers, tell us. 
Yet the distilled water of philosophical speculation is 



40 CRYING FOR THE MOON 

a poor substitute for the wine of life. For I should 
like to be alive continuously — now that I have at 
length a footing in this ramshackle world — to 
watch developments, to see revolutions and evolu- 
tions, above all the climax, whatever that may be. I 
am glad to have been alive, to have known how the 
Titanic went down and how Scott died in the Ant- 
arctic. I am happy at the thought that I have lived to 
see men fly like birds over the country and to read the 
poems of Francis Thompson. We live in extremely 
interesting times, but how will things fadge in the 
future ? When will socialism come ? What will 
biology do with evolution ? Who will be the next 
world-genius ? Yet in a little while I know I shall be 
dead and probably as unconscious and unconsidered 
as before — a heap of ashes within four rotten planks. 

The future has a fascination for me which I cannot 
resist. I take a gambler's feverish interest in it. Life 
is as exciting as a game of cards or a holiday at 
Monte Carlo. We turn up each day like a card and if 
we are optimists expect it to be the ace of trumps. 
Each day brings with it a piece of the unknown and 
each evening we have definitely annexed a piece of 
what in the morning was unknowable. When a man 
dies, it is a shock. Yet there is always the satisfac- 
tion of knowing that the end came in such a manner 
and on such a day. A man sets out to accomplish 
some great task, to portray the Human comedy 



CRYING FOR THE MOON 41 

(Balzac) or to write the history of the Roman Empire 
(Gibbon). Day follows day and carries him a stage 
nearer the desired end. " Shall I finish it ?" he asks 
himself, and strains his eyes, peering into the future in 
vain. He labours on with all the intense excitement 
of a race but with none of its bustle, till the last day 
comes and he writes " Finis " with a sigh and drops 
his pen. It is an eerie business — exploring the tor- 
tuous galleries of time. 

XII. 
As I finish writing this entry in front of my window, 
the sun is going down. I review my desires as they 
come crowding past ! I have searched every quarter 
of my existence and everywhere I have found more 
and more desires for life. I turn them out and they 
join in the procession. I watch it, brooding — hand on 
cheek like Carlyle — until a final birth-throe of desire 
is brought forth — consummating all the others ! 
I desire to draw together all the knowledge of the 
world, past, present, and future, and to be conscious 
of it as a single simultaneous phenomenon, just as 
soon as a signal, such as the fall of a hammer on an 
anvil, should be given to me. ... It was simply 
impious ! But, surely, if ever, it would be then, in 
that moment, that the meaning of the universe would 
stand revealed and the craving for the intellectual 
satisfaction of final and complete knowledge would 



42 CRYING FOR THE MOON 

abate. I should drink my fill of beauty and have no 
long-er any dread of finding at the bottom of the cup 
the ghost-like enigma that haunts all beautiful things. 
The world would be beautiful — and intelligible as 
well I should breathe a sigh and rest. The loss of 
one's personal immortality or personal identity would 
be a small price to pay for such an immeasurable gain. 

But vain imaginings all these ! — leaving me torn, 
dechirS, blinded ! In the impious desire to know and 
feel everything from the beginning to the end, to be 
immanent in everything, I was climbing up the battle- 
ments toward eternity. The Olympians seeing me 
down in the distance very properly cast me back into 
the pit of mortal life — just as they cast Satan, the 
apostate angel, out of Heaven. Satan was a lucky 
devil : he carried down with him at least the memory 
of Heaven. 

So be it, then. Let me return to my insects and 
worms. In fact, the man who on seeing before him, 
fresh and brilliant, a plant — the scarlet pimpernel — or 
a worm — the mullein moth caterpillar — still continues 
in pain and anguish to cry for the moon, would be 
scarcely human. Give me the man who will surrender 
the whole world for a moss or a caterpillar, and im- 
practicable visions for a simple human delight. Yes, 
that shall be my practice. I prefer Richard Tefferies to 
Swedenborg and Oscar Wilde to Thomas a Kempis. 



THE INSULATION OF THE EGO 

December loth, 1914. — Day after day, month after 
month throughout the year in dizzy revolutions I go 
on meeting the same people doing the same thing at 
the same time — the same lukewarm railway official 
like some huge mechanical doll clipping tickets as the 
silent procession of suburban dummies carrying news- 
papers and despatch cases files past the barrier to 
catch the 9.1; there is always the same loquacious 
newsvendor with the same parrot-cry, " Mr. Cook is 
always ready to serve you, Sir"; and just within the 
Museum itself stands the same slit-eyed policeman — a 
monster figure that supports the arch and touches its 
hat with a movement of the right hand. Every day 
all these and a hundred others are doing the same 
thing in the same spot almost to a square inch, and it 
is difficult to believe that they are ever away or that 
they ever do anything else. I forget that they are 
human beings and have stomachs and opinions. 
Routine induces a sort of somnambulism. The in- 
cessant revolution of days — daylight and darkness, 
daylight and darkness like the opening and closing of 
a camera's shutter worked continuously — hypnotizes 

43 



44 THE INSULATION OF THE EGO 

the mind into a dull, glassy intentness on the private 
business in hand. The world is a machine and spins 
like a governor; all these people are just so many- 
automata. 

One day the policeman said to me, " Good news, 
Sir, this morning." I was so surprised I hardly knew 
what to answer for a moment. It pulled me out of my 
stupor for a day or so, and set me wondering at the 
extraordinary aloofness and insulation of my life. I 
must certainly invite these automata to a rendezvous 
one day at the nearest hotel, just to see if their clock- 
work can swallow beer. 

The fact of the matter is we have no intelligent 
curiosity. Provided other folk do their duty by us, 
that is all we care. To the employer, employees are 
merely " hands " ; to the General, soldiers are so many 
"rifles." 

February 22nd, igi S- — Every man is an island. I 
sit awhile in Hyde Park and watch the folk — rich 
Jews, peers, guardsmen. Beau Brummels — see how 
they pass, self absorbed, ego centric. No one interests 
them save themselves. Everyone else is looked 
through or looked over or not seen at all. They all 
sweep past with an arrogant self-sufficiency without 
curiosity and without observation. It makes me feel 
I am an apparition, visible to only a few. 

I spend the whole morning passing in and out 



THE INSULATION OF THE EGO 45 

among tiiis crowd, seizing snippets of conversation, 
staring for as long as I dare, determined for at least 
one day in seven to shake off my hypnosis. I should 
like to have a psychological jemmy to prise open the 
minds of some of these strange, secretive men and 
women flowing along, to rifle the caskets of their 
innermost consciousness of all its wealth of personality 
and life history. If I were a millionaire (so I fancy — 
for to-day I am devoured by curiosity) I would hire 
an army of private detectives merely to satisfy my 
curiosity about some of the people I see in the streets 
of London. It would be so jolly on observing a face 
or an incident to be able to turn to the detective 
accompanying me and say " Please follow this up and 
let me have your report by Monday next." No crumb 
of information about some folk is too small to be con- 
temmed. It would be interesting to know if that man 
uses " Baffo " for his moustache or why he calls his 
dog " Tiddly-Winks." I should be grateful for that 
woman's Christian name (it is surely Cynthia, or 
Cecilia ?). I should like to be able to put a penny in 
each one's slot and draw out the story of his life in a 
long tape. 

Englishmen are difficult to get to know. Within 
the circle of their own collars, trespassers will be prose- 
cuted. They have a splendid aristocratic reticence 
about themselves. And if you seem too curious, the 
healthy-minded, English stalwart shakes his flst at 



46 THE INSULATION OF THE EGO 

the intruder and warns him that an Englishman's 
home is his castle. Warm and comfortable within his 
own fur-lined coat of self-esteem, securely veiled by 
this impenetrable cloth he gazes out upon the candid 
man, who casts his clouts — even the napkin about his 
loins — as if he were a shivering lunatic. Ah ! you 
furtive gentleman ! it is pleasant to play the detective 
with you ! In spite of your precautionary measures, 
many of your secrets are easily found out and even 
some of your solid caskets rifled upon a little careful 
scrutiny. You all have a naked body I know. And 
you all have a naked soul behind those barricades and 
bastions with which you face the world. Why not 
confess ? Why this studied insulation. Why cut 
yourself off from your fellows ? Have you never a 
desire to strip the body bare — as a sacrament, to rend 
the veil of every temple — out of curiosity, to dynamite 
every cabal, to shout into every silence and reveal all 
that lies hid anywhere ? — ^Aye and to scorn that 
crawling hypocrisy I read just now in the newspaper 
— " She led a certain life," meaning she was a whore. 
***** 
Confession is good for the soul, and is the only 
foundation for a perfect union of the heart. It indi- 
cates, at any rate, a desire to have the light of day 
upon dark places ; it invites consideration and investi- 
gation, although it does not mean that we shall thereby 
win the sympathy and understanding of others. . . . 



THE INSULATION OF THE EGO 4; 

" Is there any person in the whole wide world," asked 
Henry Rycroft in the Private Papers, " on whom I 
could invariably rely for perfect sympathy ?" Do two 
souls ever fit absolutely slick into one another ? It 
seems rather that there is always some rub that has 
to be eased, some little piece of behaviour or some 
opinion that will never be understood even by our 
dearest friend. And a single misunderstanding bars 
the way to perfect sympathy. As between the most 
intimately blended friends — Patroclus and Achilles, 
Orestes and Pylades, Damon and Pythias — there are 
some matters always held carefully in reserve — the 
heart of everyone contains secrets he dare never com- 
municate. As for marriage, intellectual honesty 
between husband and wife is ever a dangerous experi- 
ment and one which few could practise if they would. 
For love is a fog and most marriages are built on 
inaccuracies if not on lies. Yet how can anyone be 
perfectly loved if he cannot be perfectly understood. 
Had Leander lived, Hero may have had a very 
different tale to tell of him. And we have yet to learn 
the subsequent history of King Cophetua and his 
beggar-maid — probably a very ill-assorted couple 
indeed. 

Confession, moreover, is a difficult duty, for it 
implies self-knowledge, and accurate self-knowledge 
is as rare as a blue moon. Yet, if we do not know 
ourselves, how can we expect our friends to know us ? 



48 THE INSULATION OF THE EGO 

Truth to tell we are so completely insulated that no 
soul ever comes into actual contact with another. We 
may stand in the apposition of friendship or be 
bracketed together for life in holy wedlock. But true 
contact is never established. " I love you " — how the 
words have goaded the inarticulate lover to despair- 
ing parrot-like repetition. Whenever one ego purposes 
to hold communication with another, the concentric 
barriers of matter can scarcely be overcome by em- 
ploying human vocables — crude, hefty, obstinate 
words. That is why comfortable philosophers like 
Maeterlinck (and Thoreau before him) have so many 
seductive remarks on silence. Maeterlinck knows 
that man is only half articulate, so he consoles himself 
with extolling the wonder and magic of silence ! 
That is so like the adaptable human being ! Self- 
expression is an impossible ideal — our warmest 
emotions must be impounded in cold brute words — 
even the best and most beautiful are merely verbiage 
so long as we are under the influence of a great 
experience. So we pretend that silence is all in all. 

June 6th^ iQi 5- — There are times when nothing 
satisfies. This evening I looked at the sunset with 
clouds piled up like the Halls of Valhalla. But I 
wanted more. My mind restlessly ran over the facts : 
clouds — suspended moisture ; colour — atmospheric 
dust. I scoffed. How humiliating that seemed. 



THE INSULATION OF THE EGO 49 

Sheer physical beauty was not enough. I wanted to 
be more intimate with the beauty I watched from the 
outside — a spectator only. I would enter into the 
sunset completely in some perfect and beautiful 
Atonement. 

I am tired of being fended off, tired of my insula- 
tion; I want to touch beauty, or actually to touch 
some other person. In such a mood I could listen, say, 
to Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, and laugh at it 
derisively. How futile even for that great soul to 
attempt to escape out of his mortality in self expres- 
sion by a vehicle so coarse and so inadequate. " Is it 
not a strange thing," asks Benedick, " that sheep's 
guts should hale men's souls out of their bodies ?" It 
is indeed strange — and humiliating. 

In these moments of icy exaltation, I spurn the 
instrument of every art. I read through the Ode on a 
Grecian Urn and under an overwhelming conviction 
of clairvoyance, for a moment or two perceive the 
coarseness and ineptitude of an art that uses queer 
looking written symbols to represent certain curious 
sounds. Then I look down through " La Belle Dame 
sans Merci " in a purely quizzical way and feel piqued 
at it — that is all. Generation after generation is lured 
towards this marvellous work of art, but no one as yet 
has succeeded in laying sacrilegious hands upon its 
Holy Grail. Those few verses of the apothecary youth 
will always remain as much a mystery as the Trinity. 

4 



so THE INSULATION OF THE EGO 

He did not understand himself what it was he had 
written. They were just a few lines stuck into a letter 
to a friend one day. " La Belle Dame sans Merci " is 
a taunt, an aggressive, bristling enigma, an impudent 
conundrum. 

Artists must be the most miserable of men : for they 
are men with human capacities and yet with God 
Almighty's passion to create. That is why some 
artists seem mad or gradually become unintelligible. 
Inside or behind every masterpiece may be heard the 
faint rumour of a soul in travail going round and 
round in vain endeavour to escape. In his passionate 
endeavour to break his bonds the great artist strains 
his art to breaking point : pictures become unin- 
telligible daubs, music becomes cacophony and poetry 
hysteria. And the wise man comes to speak in unin- 
telligible riddles. Insane artists ! — what glimpses 
they may have had ! Mad Blake ! What did he see ? 
— Mad philosophers ! — blinded perhaps in an ex- 
plosion of light. 

February 27 ih^ igi6. — Man is so securely cut off 
and surrounded, so perfectly insulated, that he cannot 
get out into the life beyond himself nor can anything 
beyond get into him. Nothing ever actually touches 
him. He has buffers, fenders, bastions. 

Should any experience, any emotion, whether grief 



THE INSULATION OF THE EGO 51 

or joy, of powerful voltage really establish a contact, 
death would be instantaneous from electrocution. 
Mankind knows this and therefore takes the necessary 
precautions, meeting the assaults of the world with 
every kind of safeguard. He patches grief with 
proverbs and makes misfortune drunk with candle 
wasters. " Afflictions induce callosities," says Sir 
Thomas Browne, " and the smartest strokes of afflic- 
tion leave but short smart upon us." He drugs 
himself with the anodyne of Christian consolations, 
shirking the poignancy of a grief that should electro- 
cute, with some glib quotation from the New 
Testament. Man shuffles out of his miseries by self- 
indulgence in casuistical ethics, anointing his despair 
with talk about patriotism, self-sacrifice, and national 
duty. 

Man is a pitifully adaptable creature. He works in 
coal mines and sewers, he lives on fifteen shillings a 
week, he volunteers for the prospect of dismember- 
ment by a German shell, when before, perhaps, he 
would complain bitterly of a scratch from a briar. 
Even this terrible agony of war, Time and the news- 
papers' chatter are helping us to reduce to the level of 
Parliamentary News or " City Gossip." It may seem 
a mocking remark to make at this time, but few, if 
any, realize the accumulated horrors of the war. Such 
suffering is beyond the capacity of the human soul to 
experience. We are too small, too insulated, too 



52 THE INSULATION OF THE EGO 

egoistic. We may weep for our own sorrows or those 
of immediate friends, and even (if we have the good- 
will) try in imagination to multiply that grief by 
millions (as if grief were arithmetic ! ), yet we should 
still be far from even a crude realization of the collec- 
tive horrors of the war — our souls are too small, too 
circumscribed and petty. If man had what Shelley 
called the Creative Faculty to imagine what they 
know — wars would cease. 

To be candid, man is ineradicably commonplace. 
No sooner is he the fortunate possessor of some 
beautiful grief that should be inconsolable, than 
maybe a fortnight, a month, a year later, his con- 
sciousness, working industriously upon it, has reduced 
it to more comfortable proportions. If he wrings his 
hands, he will soon be ringing the bells. Time heals, 
we say. But there is something about Time's irre- 
sistible therapeutic properties that in result is almost 
ridiculous. My happiness this year makes my grief 
two years ago childish, impertinent. Yet, if I had 
possessed the decent steadfastness of feeling to con- 
tinue to grieve, my friends would have said I was 
morbid and silly. Last month I was in despair. 
To-day my circumstances are absolutely unchanged, 
except that Time has applied his balsam and I am 
cheerful once more. 

Nothing breaks a man. He will brag about his 
misfortunes as loudly as about his successes. No 



THE INSULATION OF THE EGO 53 

shock penetrates behind his insulation. He is jolted, 
perhaps, but not killed. Grief is often a luxury. To 
restore the limb to a beggar with a wooden leg would 
be almost his displeasure. 

It is impossible to circumvent the human soul — that 
precious quiddity that triumphs over all things, 
suffereth all things, is not easily provoked. But the 
psychological truth is that the so-called conquests of 
the soul are usually only strategical retreats dictated 
by the instinct for preservation of self. My own 
" conquest " was only a retreat. From a crisis in which 
I should have fought to the death I shrewdly retired ; 
in a prolonged and almost continuous period of the 
most revolting ill-health, instead of becoming rebel 
and paying the last penalty for it, I developed the 
shameless endurance of a beast of burden — meekly 
shouldered my cross, and was even cheerful about it — 
that is what disgusts me. Me and men like me no 
amount of chastisement would ever correct. We just 
go on calling out "The Devil a bit! Cheero!" like 
the Parrot in the thunderstorm, poor foolish ridiculous 
bird. 

By withdrawing here, giving ground there, and in 
general retreating along all my line of life, I have 
fended off the enemy armed with the scythe, and saved 
remnants of my forces such as they are, where, in a 
similar case, a man of courage would have joined 
battle and overcome him, for it is "great to do that 



54 THE INSULATION OF THE EGO 

thing Uiat ends all other deeds, which sliackles acci- 
dents and bolts up cliange." 

And as witli his pains, so also with his pleasures. 
Xo joy sends a man crazy. He is ecstatic for a 
morning perhaps, but he soon settles down. He has 
not the strengtli of soul to keep long at the top of his 
compass or at the bottom. And in our inmost heart, 
with what superlative self -con tempt do we watch our 
joy or sorrow die down and disappear ! 

Xo wonder bowls us out To all the marvellous 
tliingps of the universe — the sun overhead, the little 
blue flowers at our feet, to birds and aeroplanes 
travelling through the air — we extend an oily, vulgar 
familiarity. Where we should stand hat in hand at a 
respectful distance we advance, and with a careless 
jerk of the head sigpiify acquaintance. As Carlyle 
said : the average man regards tlie making of a world 
with about as much wonder as tlie baking of an apple 
dumpling. 

The consciousness is like some baneful atmosphere. 
As soon as they enter it, our emotions, at first like 
glorious white-hot stars, rapidly cool do\s*n to finish 
up often as cold as the moon. 

Poor human frailty ! We are only children, witli 
new toys, and broken toys and old familiar toys. Our 
greatest experiences are only nursery* episodes and 
our greatest emotions only a little less fleeting than 
the tears of childhood. Even Job lived to tlie age of 



THE INSULATION OF THE EGO 55 

140, and became happy in the possession of beautiful 
daughters, and God knows how many valuable she- 
asses. Yet this was the fellow who cursed the day he 
was born. 

Perfect dignity is denied us. For if we persisted in 
grief we are morbid, and if we sweep on with the tide 
our memories are ridiculously short and — out of sight, 
out of mind. So wags the world. 

• « • * • 

March loth^ igi6. — It is a nauseating fact which 
must nevertheless be owned, that however miserable 
or despairing a man may be he loves himself ever. No 
lunge from the sharpest rapier penetrates his self- 
esteem. Right in there in the centre of his being, he 
keeps his lonely court. In sickness, in health, in 
sorrow, joy, failure, or success, in every conceivable 
set of circumstances, the ego sits enthroned, sur- 
rounded only by the bodyguard of his own self- 
consciousness, self-pity, self-adrniration, self-love, and 
from these not even the anarchy of self-hate can drive 
him forth, for he will still love himself in hating him- 
self for his own self-love. If I claim to be incon- 
solable, you know I am already sucking consolation 
from the very fact of my being inconsolable. Con- 
sciousness of self shadows us all. As soon as I have 
a generous impulse or do a generous deed, my poU 
clerk and shadow registers it, and the virtue goes out 
of me. If I make a witty remark, a bell rings within 



56 THE INSULATION OF THE EGO 

me — and I can scarcely conceal my confusion. Some 
of the emotion at Swift's Epitaph : 

" Ubi saeva indigo alio 
Cor ulterius lacerare nequit 

leaves us when we find he wrote it himself ; and when 
Mr. H. G. Wells remarks that all sound, sober, and 
sane-minded men are hopeful of progress, you know- 
he is thinking of Mr. H. G. Wells. The automatic 
self-approval of the self-consciousness is like some 
ridiculous chorus pursuing a man across the stage of 
life and turning it into opera-bouffe. It is a strange 
thing that man so small should be so full of self. Is 
there anything more contemptible to the looker-on 
than the egotism of a tiny Ego. What, then, must 
God think ? How laughable it is that every one, 
however impoverished in soul or intellect, insists on 
clinging to his own identity, and would not exchange 
himself even with Shakespeare ! 

The Ego is a monarch, and, like a monarch, un- 
approachable. In every one of us our insulation is 
complete. 



INFINITIES. 

March 8th, igi S- — On the top of an empty omnibus 
to-day I cast my eye for a second at a little heap of 
dirty used-up 'bus tickets collected by chance up in 
one corner. The sight of them unnerved me. For a 
moment I felt almost physically sick. This feeling 
was so instantaneous that it was some time later that 
I discovered the cause of it, when I began to reflect 
upon all the implications which the little heap of 
tickets sent ramifying through the eye to the brain — 
the number of persons, for example, that daily boarded 
this vehicle, each one bent on his little project, making 
use of the 'bus, then passing out of it again; the 
number ot miles the 'bus traversed each day, the 
number of 'buses " honking " through the streets and 
all this cataract of London life. My nerves throbbed 
with the ache of it all. In London even the names 
over the shop windows scuffle and fight with one 
another and with you as you pass ; advertisements on 
hoardings, walls, windows, scream at you, wheedle 
you, interrogate, advise, suggest. At all times the ear 
catches fragments of conversation as the crowds pass 
along the streets, or the trample of their footsteps as 

57 



5« INFINITIES 

they rush up and down wooden stairways to the trains 
— both above ground and below ground — a maelstrom 
of activity. 

After a long ride on the top of an omnibus along 
the main arteries of traffic I always experience that 
dazed muddled sensation which comes from looking 
too long into the Milky Way. Consecutive thought 
or reflection become impossible — by the end of the 
journey I am merely a mechanical registering instru- 
ment ticking off such fatuous impressions as — " What 
a funny name over that shop," or " That is a nice 
house," or "How funnily that man walks." It is 
appalling to reflect that each church passed attracts 
its little group of worshippers and is familiar to them 
alone, that every Town Hall or municipal building 
knows its familiar councillors and officials, that every 
square with its library or polytechnic is a vortex of 
endeavour which I know nothing about, for people I 
have never met and shall never see. How strange is 
the fact that every public-house is an evening Mecca 
to its habitues, who are intimate with all the furniture, 
the pictures on the walls, the figures on the mugs, and 
that in every public-house it is the same, and yet that 
all of this is absolutely nothing to me. 

I dart across thoroughfares and rattle down 
through others — buildings and houses everywhere, in 
ivery building people, in every private house a family 
circle, and yet I do not know them, and I do not seem 



INFINITIES 59 

to care. Millions of callous persons living together in 
the same great city and not speaking to one another — 
persons in the same street, nay, in the same house, and 
not speaking ! How I hate you all ! For you are too 
many and I am too small. I gaze down on you — you 
prodigious quantities of tiny men — emmets — passing 
swiftly by and feel sick of my own mortality and 
finiteness. I should like to be a god methinks. . . . 
To love merely one's own children or one's own 
parents, how ridiculous that seems, how puny, how 
stifling ! To be interested only in one's own life or 
profession, to know and remain satisfied merely with 
one's own circumscribed experiences — how contemp- 
tible ! It is necessary to be unselfish — even extrava- 
gantly selfless — quite as much for the sake of one's 
intellect and understanding as for the good of one's 
heart and soul. " But the most terrible thing of all 
was that in all the houses there lived human beings 
and about all the streets were moving human beings. 
There was a multitude of them and all unknown to 
him — strangers — and all of them lived their own 
separate life hidden from the eyes of others ; they were 
without interruption, being born and dying, and there 
was no beginning nor end to the stream. . . . There 
was a stout gentleman at whom Petrov glanced, disap- 
pearing around the corner — and never would Petrov 
see him again. Even if he wished to find him he 
would search for him all his life and never succeed." — 



6o INFINITIES 

From Andreyev's story, *" The City " (which i read 
since making this entry). 

» « « » » 

I think I should love Russians if I knew them. I 
believe I have most in common with the Russian 
temperament. How else explain that in Russian 
books — in Lermontov, in Turgenev, in Dostoievsky, 
in Tchekov, Poushkin, Goncharov, and others — I so 
frequently find almost exact transcripts of my own 
life and character. It is like seeing oneself constantly 
in a portrait gallery, and naturally flatters a reader's 
vanity. 

March iSth^ 191 5- — All this morning I have been 
floating aimlessly along the tideways of human souls 
down by the London docks, in Commercial Road, 
Whitechapel, Fleet Street, eddying round Piccadilly 
Circus, and so homewards into quiet waters, like a 
battered ship into port. I sought a little rest in the 
afternoon in the public library and picked up the 
Bookman^ my customary fare. Then I observed for a 
while my fellow-loungers and next, casually picked up 
the Performer, which happened to lie ready to hand. 

I confess it interested me, and induced me to have a 
look at several other periodicals I had never examined 
before. I read in succession the Gentlewoman, the 
Grocer, the Builder, the Horological Journal, the 
Musical Times, the Bird Fanciery the Herald of 



INFINITIES 6i 

Health, the Bible Student. What began as a whim 
now developed into a solemn passion. I ransacked 
the whole room for the various professional journals, 
trade organs, periodicals devoted to special move- 
ments, societies, enthusiasms. It was an extraordinary 
experiment to make in that dirty, quiet room among 
those few dirty, dejected, sprawling loafers by turning 
over the leaves of periodicals to conjure up and 
review the whole of contemporary civilization. I 
enjoyed one long delicious eavesdropping; I was an 
invisible man moving freely about unobserved among 
my fellow-creatures and listening to all their tattle. 
Each journal was a window through which I, outside 
in the dark, could gaze in at brilliantly lighted 
interiors and watch all that was going on — it was a 
masque, a harlequinade, every performer delightfully 
unconscious of curious observation. Through the cold 
print of a paragraph, behind the lines of some stilted 
announcement in an obituary notice, a competition or 
an advertisement, I traversed all modern society in a 
series of long kangaroo leaps. It is easy to sit 
comfortably at a table of periodicals and, like an 
omnipotent magician, wand in hand, call up at will, 
Park Lane or Whitechapel, the study of canaries or 
the Bible, order to appear in succession the licensing 
trade, all Band of Hope Unions, the Navy League, 
the theatrical world. You can call up for personal 
interview musicians, grocers, duchesses, tricholo|;ists, 



62 INFINITIES 

princes, pastry cooks. They told me everything. I 
searched their inmost natures and with perfect in- 
genuousness they surrendered all. It was pleasant to 
feel the shock of transition from, say, the Gentle- 
woman to the Shof-assistant^ or from the Free-thinker 
to the Bible-student. It made my sceptical mind a 
little gleeful to note how many pairs of antagonisms 
there are : the Suffragette and the Anti-Suffragette, 
the vaccinators and the anti-vaccinators, Stephen 
Paget and Stephen Coleridge, the Labour Leader and 
the Saturday Review. I felt the same sardonic 
humour as a cinema film provokes, showing you, say, 
the Houses of Parliament with a "fade-through" of 
Guy Fawkes in the cellars underneath. 

In the Gentlewoman I read an article entitled, 
" What Gentlewomen are doing in the War." In the 
Shop-assistant poor Kipps is fighting for a living 
wage " against the callous indifference of the upper 
classes never more emphasized than at the present 
time." The Bird-fanciers are thinking of reviving the 
Roller fancy in the Grimsby district, the trichologists 
are commenting on the grave dangers to health arising 
from neglected scalps; an anxious inquirer in the 
Bible-student wants to know if " Holy Spirit " means 
" A number of angels " and, if so, how explain Matt, 
i. 20. Mr. J. Tripp, vice-president of the Horological 
Institute, has been indisposed, and his condition is 
causing anxiety to fellow horologists. Musicians call 



INFINITIES 63 

for a comic opera revival, and a general practitioner 
urges treatment for fracture by mobilization. 

My most interesting peep, however, was at the 
vegetarians through an exceptionally transparent 
window called The Herald of Healthy devoted, so it 
informed me, to the " Physical Regeneration of Man- 
kind." Its first item was the photograph of a very 
cheerful old gentleman — " the late Mr. William 
Harrison showing a very fine brain development and 
philanthropic characteristics " — as if he were a prize 
beast at a fat stock show. His obituary notice was so 
curious that I copied it out in full. Here, however, I 
give only a few extracts. After referring to Mr. 
Harrison's " indefatigable and self-sacrificing labours 
on behalf of the vegetarian propaganda of which he 
was a pioneer," the writer proceeded to comment upon 
the significant circumstance that Mr. Harrison's father 
was a butcher, a fact which may have played no unim- 
portant part in directing his attention to vegetables. 
" Early impressed by Bible truths, from his youth up 
he carried as his constant pocket companions, the New 
Testament and Ben Johnson's Dictionary." (52V.) 
"In conclusion this self-taught Lancashire man over 
a long career preached and practised, taught and 
demonstrated undying human truths and scientific 
principles which 99 per cent, of the costly collegiates 
of this and other civilized countries do not know. 
Early in life Mr. Harrison signed Dr. Smudge's * Long 



64 INFINITIES 

Pledge' to abstain from tobacco, snuff -taking, and 
alcohol. Subsequently it was his pride and privilege 
to add to the ' Long Pledge ' the following additional 
pledges : Never to be a butcher, never to be a pawn- 
broker, never to sell tobacco or snuff, never to convert 
friendship into merchandise. I hope," comments 
the writer, " that similar men will arise as examples of 
this human, health-giving, life-saving cult and tliat 
our propaganda will spread further and faster to 
enlighten and bless this, our rising, war-stained, 
inoculated, be-drugged, deceived, and deluded genera- 
tion, so that it may warn by the fruits of its experience 
a new and coming race." 

I amused myself next with the comparison between 
this and the Performer^ which described in no un- 
measured terms the feats of " The great Jaskoe," the 
most daring hand and foot balancer in the world, of 
the celebrated Elsie Finney, now considering engage- 
ments for revues, water productions, and swimming 
displays, and of a hundred other famous men and 
women. Jack Straw claims, " I run the gamut from 
laughter to tears. I speak the King's English. I get 
laughter cleanly. The audience quote me long after I 
have left your town." Mexico's most beautiful 
siffleur says, " I will make your town talk. Don't miss 
this. Book right now. Can work any stage. Have 
featured every hall including the London Coliseum." 

After attentively reading the short accounts of th?. 



INFINITIES 65 

current transactions of all the learned societies, pub- 
lished regularly in the Atkenceum^ with a mind a 
perfect jumble of "Half-crowns of Charles I." (ex- 
hibited by the numismatists), of the " integrals of a 
certain Riccati equation connected with Halphen's 
transformation" (which have been charming mathe- 
maticians), of an ivory comb of the eleventh century 
sent by Pope Gregory to Bertha, Queen of Kent (and 
now exhibited by Sir Hercules Reed to the Anti- 
quaries), I picked up a halfpenny evening newspaper, 
seeking relief. But I was cursed with the mood, and 
at once proceeded to observe cynically what " went to 
the post," and "whether the hlly stayed well." It 
made me feel deliciously satirical to read in another 
column that amateur gardeners must " at once arrange 
for the imminent planting of spring bedders." And 
here in a little backwater, out of the way of the catar- 
act, in a corner devoted to the Home, advice to 
knitters : " Purl one, plain one." In many respects it 
seems to be beneath God's dignity to be omniscient. 



I staggered out into the open air in time to see a 
very fine sunset. I was sick of the infinity of separate 
Things and just wanted to be Man looking at the 
Sunset. It was a distinct relief to my congested brain 
to observe the one Sun simply — thai at least seemed 
an immense and irreducible Unity. 

5 



66 INFINITIES 

April loth^ 1915- 

*' O Seigneur donnez-moi la force et la courage 
De contempler mon corps et mon cceur sans degout.'' 

Could anything be more ridiculous than our means 
of progression — I implore you to watch the two legs, 
calliper-like, measuring out the ground so slow and 
infinitely laborious. My self-esteem requires at least 
a pair of wings or even a pair of smooth-running 
automatic wheels. As for sitting down, that seems 
indecent — particularly according to the method of 
certain old gentlemen who with great deliberation 
catch up their coat tails and carefully deposit the 
gluteal mass into some close fitting armchair. 

But why do I trouble to write when to hold this 
pen is so irksome — a single pen in a single hand 
tracing each single letter of every single word, all so 
slow, so laborious, so painfully human. I want all the 
pens that ever poets held. I would be Hydra-headed 
and Argus-eyed, I desire to possess as many hands as 
Briareus, to be multiple, legion, a Kosmos. I desire to 
wave a wand, and then at the crash of drums and 
cymbals to have everything achieved. What a simple 
man he must be who takes pride in his own work, in 
that inconsiderable contribution to the world's output, 
even after a life of toil. How commonly a man who 
can do one thing well goes on doing it again and 
again as unreflectively as Old Father William, or a 



INFINITIES 67 

squirrel in a wheel. There seems to me no satisfaction 
in achieving those things of which we know we are 
already capable. If I had written the Mneid there 
would still be the Iliad. . . . 

April nth, igi S- — To live is a continuous humilia- 
tion. Man was born with the desire to be free, yet 
everywhere he is in the hopeless shackles of mortality 
and of iron natural law. If Lucifer was proud, he was 
not so proud as I : it wounds my self-esteem not to be 
able to perform miracles, to move mountains, to play 
fast and loose with base clay, to be in direct telepathic 
rapport with the universe and its beauty. No one 
more than I could be readier to listen eagerly and 
encouragingly to the claims of Spiritualists and 
Christian Scientists. These claims do not surprise me. 
What does surprise me is that, as touching miracles, 
the evidence still seems to be on the side of David 
Hume. I ask myself, " What is the secret of the 
universe ?" and I am staggered to find that I do not 
know. What an amazing thing it is that no one 
knows. "Avid of all dominion and all mightiness," 
yet is man " successive unto nothing but patrimony of 
a little mould and entail of four planks." That 
bumble-bee in the fox-glove yonder — how can I be 
about my human business until I know ? Who is 
going to be busied over anything at all so long as 
overhead the sun shines unmolested and underneath 



68 INFINITIES 

his feet, secure in mystery, grows a single blade of 
grass ? To be alive is so incredible that I can no more 
than lie still on my back between the immense vertical 
heights of my ignorance like a newborn babe sunk in 
the grand canon of Colorado. In the embrace of this 
mother Sphinx the earth, my own individuality 
shrinks to vanishing-point, I see myself through the 
wrong end of a telescope — a tiny speck crawling on a 
great hill. 

"When I consider the short duration of my life, 
swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little 
space which I £11, and even can see, engulfed in the 
infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, 
and which know me not, I am frightened, and am 
astonished at being here rather than there, why now 
rather than then. Who has put me here ? By whose 
order and direction have this place and time been 
allotted to me ?" (Pascal.) 

April 26th, igi S- — In the spirit of pious resignation 
Thomas a Kempis wrote : " Meddle not with things 
that be too high for thee, but study such things as 
yield compunction to the heart rather than elevation 
to the head." I like to put alongside this the delight- 
ful passage from Sir Thomas Browne's " Religio " : 
" I love to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my 
reason to an altitudo! 'Tis my solitary recreation 
to pose my apprehension with those involved enigmas 



INFINITIES 69 

and riddles of the Trinity, Incarnation, and Resurrec- 
tion." Recreation is great ! 

Like Sir Thomas Browne I have always meddled 
with things that are too high for me, not, certainly, 
as a recreation, but as a result of intense intellectual 
discomfort. I find a sulky delight in pulverizing the 
intellect by thinking on the time for example it takes 
for light to travel from the sun to the earth, upon the 
number of stars in the Milky Way, upon the infinite 
divisibility of matter, upon Sir Oliver Lodge's 
dictum that there are more atoms in a thimble-full of 
water than there are thimble-fulls of water in the 
Atlantic Ocean. When a geologist speaks of the 
Cambrian, I want to cross myself; when great 
formulas like " intrastellar space " or " secular time " 
thunder in my ears, I want to crawl away like a rat 
into a hole and die. 

I have always meddled with things that are too 
high for me, my first adventure being Berkeley at the 
age of fifteen, a philosopher who captured my amaze- 
ment over a period of many months. Like a little 
London gamin, I run about the great city of the mind 
and hang on behind the big motor lorries of thought. 
" Looked at from the point of view of multiplicity, 
duration disintegrates into a powder of moments, none 
of which endures, each being an instantaneity." No 
matter if I do not understand Bergson : in a sentence 
like that I catch at least the rumour of some tremen- 



70 INFINITIES 

dous thought. Again under the heading "Wall 
Street " : " Some securities showed the effects of dis- 
tribution under cover of an advance in volatile issues." 
It is like putting one's ear to a telegraph pole on top 
of a wind-swept heath. . . . Then there is William 
James and Schiller, Pragmatism and Humanism, those 
other grand peut-eires. 

* ♦ * * * 

It may be that ultimately all speculation and belief 
will become extinguished by one universal certainty. 
Man's mind that animates this globe may continue to 
ripen and develop into complete knowledge able to 
wing its way throughout the universe. Mental tele- 
pathy will dispense with our present clumsy means of 
intercourse; the Spiritualists perhaps, will investigate 
the next world as exactly as the scientific men will 
have done this; all disease be vanquished and all 
perfection attained by easy miracles (vide the Chris- 
tian Scientists), and even God Himself a familiar 
figure walking abroad upon the earth, the well-pleased 
captain of the planet. In other words, a cosmic enter- 
prise brought to a thoroughly successful conclusion by 
the triumph of infinite mind over matter. 

February 2oth^ ^9^7- — Here is a passage I have just 
hit upon. It is an O altitudo that would have pleased 
old Browne : " For ever, for all eternity. . . . Try to 
imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often 



INFINITIES 71 

seen the sand on the seashore. . . . How many of 
those tiny grains go to make up the small handful 
which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a 
mountain of that sand, a million miles high, . . . and 
a million miles broad . . . and a million miles in 
thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of 
countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there 
are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty 
ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on 
animals, atoms in the vast expanse of air : and 
imagine that at the end of every million years a little 
bird came to that mountain and carried away in its 
beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions 
upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird 
had carried away even a square foot of that mountain ; 
how many aeons upon aeons of ages before it had 
carried away all. Yet at the end of that immense 
stretch of time not even one instant of eternity can be 
said to have ended. At the end of all those billions 
and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely 
begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had 
all been carried away, and if the bird came again and 
carried it all away again, grain by grain ; and if it so 
rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the 
sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves 
on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fi.sh, 
hairs upon animals, at the end of all those innumerable 
risings and sinkmgs, not one single instant of eternity 



;2 INFINITIES 

could be said to have ended; even then at the end of 
such a period, after that aeon of time, the mere thought 
of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity 
would scarcely have begun." (From a sermon on 
eternal damnation by a Jesuit father, in James Joyce's 
" Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.") 



ESSAYS 



ON JOURNAL WRITERS 

A JOURNAL is an incondite miscellany, written from 
day to day, recording the writer's life and addressed 
either to some particular person as in Swift's Journal 
to Stella, or as in Eugenie de Guerin's Journal 
inscribed if not directly addressed to her beloved 
brother Maurice or else implicitly or explicitly 
dedicated to some abstraction or ideal confidant — in 
Fanny Burney's diary explicitly to " Nobody," in 
Maurice de Guerin's Journal to " Mon Cahier," in 
others to the "Reader," to "Posterity," "Kind 
Friend," and so forth. 

The devotee in this " petite chapelle " of literature 
should beware of shams : drunken Barnabee's Journal 
— that curious and scandalous book published in 1638 
— is rhymed Latin verse (accompanied by an English 
verse translation) describing the author's " pub crawl- 
ings " up and down the country ; Defoe's Journal of 
the Plague Year is certainly an incondite miscellany, 
but not written from day to day, and not even broken 
up into chapters ; Turgenev's " Diary of a Superfluous 
Man " is a short story in diary form. 

In all their infinite variety, real journals possess 
75 



;6 ON JOURNAL WRITERS 

this much in common : they are one and all an irre- 
sistible overflow of the writer's life, whether it be a life 
of adventure, or a life of thought, or a life of the soul. 
To be sure, if a man be sailing the Amazon, climbing 
Chimborazo, or travelling to the South Pole, it is most 
obvious and natural for him to keep a diary. Hence 
we have Darwin's Journal of the Voyage of the 
Beagle and Captain Scott's rDiary of his immortal 
expediTion. He would indeed be dull of soul who, on 
encountering strange or unprecedented experiences 
felt no desire to write them down. Meeting with great 
events or great personages startle even the inarticulate 
into eloquent speech, and the innumerable journals, 
written by soldiers and others, and sometimes pub- 
lished, especially in France* during the Great War, 
show how the fingers of the most unlikely persons do 
tingle for a pen to describe each day all they see and 
do and suffer. It is interesting to observe in passing 
that a similar crop of journals appeared one hundred 
years ago round about the time of the French Revolu- 
tion : those of Madame de Stael's circle — Benjamin 
Constant's and Sismondi's, for example, in France, 
and in England the journals of Lady Holland, Crabb 
Robinson, Madam D'Arblay. Many of these, how- 
ever, were habitual journal writers, who had been 

* See for example the Diary of a Dead Officer, by Arthur 
Graeme West : the Diary of a French Private : War Imprison- 
ment, by Gaston Riou — the author, however, being a journahst 
with marked hterary gifts. — Ed. 



ON JOURNAL WRITERS j'j 

already posting up their diaries before the storm 
broke, producing in no sense journaux par occasion as 
all war diaries are and almost all itineraries. Gray's 
Journal of his Lakeland Tour, and Boswell's Journal 
of a trip to the Hebrides are two famous literary 
journals of travel that readily occur to the mind. 

The instinct of the true journal-writer is more 
profound. To every man his own life is of great 
interest. But to all inveterate self -chroniclers of what- 
ever rank, in whatever situation or condition of life, 
their own existence seems so insistently marvellous 
that at the close of each day, being incontinent, they 
must needs pour out their sense of wonder into a 
manuscript book. Let him be only a clerk with 
spectacles and eternally pushing the pen, yet his 
journal shall reveal with what rare gusto he pursues 
his clerical existence. Though he rarely quits his 
office, life for him is full of delightful hazards and 
surprises. He will ride his high stool as if astride a 
caracoling Arab, and at night, having arrived steam- 
ing at the Inn — even though it be but a bed-sitting 
room over a tallow-chandler's shop — writes out with 
an unwearying pen the history of each day's adven- 
tures, thus : " Lunched with Brown. Later played a 
game of ' pills ' with old Bumpus and to-night went 
to see A Little Bit of Fluff!' 

But Mr. Secretary Pepys is, of course, our great 
exemplar. " Old Peepy," as Edward FitzGerald 



;8 ON JOURNAL WRITERS 

called him, was " with child " to see every new thing, 
and everything was " pretty to see." The most 
commonplace affairs had a significance, while a real 
event became portentous. He rolled each day upon 
his tongue with the relish of an epicure, and scarce a 
day passed but his Magpie's covetous eye caught 
some bright and novel object for conveyance to that 
wonderful larder — the Diary. It is amusing to con- 
struct an imaginary picture of him — with all serious- 
ness and heads bent together over the book — 
participating in the perplexity of that other wonderful 
child, Marjorie Fleming, who affirmed in her diary of 
confessions that " the most devilish thing is 8 
times 8, and J times 7 is what nature itself can't 
endure." 

With Marie Bashkirtseff, it was something more 
than a gusto for life. Life was a passion and a fever 
that presently overwhelmed her. " When I think of 
what I shall be when I am twenty," she wrote as a 
child after looking long in the mirror, " I smack my 
lips !" And later, when Fate, like a ring of steel, was 
slowly closing in on her : " I don't curse life ; on the 
contrary, I find it all good — would you believe it, I 
find it all good, even my tears and suffering. I like 
to cry, I like to be in despair, I like tq be sad and 
miserable, and I love life in spite of all." Even the 
languorous Amiel in the course of his amazing pages 
here and there bubbles up into an ecstasy — and Amiel 



ON JOURNAL WRITERS 79 

was a Professor of Moral Philosophy, and a dull one 
at that. 



In the course of every diary will be found entries 
testifying to the author's pleasure in re-reading his 
past. This is a curiously constant feature — see, e.g., 
Tolstoi's Diary, March 20th, 1852. The diarist is a 
sentimentalist in love v/ith his past, however painful 
or unprofitable it may have been. Better than any 
man he knows how that silent artist, the memory, 
working in the depths, ceaselessly fashions our per- 
haps dreary or commonplace existence, until the sea 
one day casts up its beautiful shells, and we are 
delighted and surprised to find our lives have been so 
beautiful. Of Pepys, Stevenson remarked that neither 
Hazlitt nor Rousseau had a more romantic passion 
for their past — " it clung about his heart like an ever- 
green." So, in dressing gown and slippers, before the 
night fire, your sentimentalist with finger in the book, 
like a genie, conjures up the days gone by. He and 
his past keep house together; it is an almost tangible 
Presence with every feature of which he is familiar — 
indeed, is it not a row of precious volumes on a shelf, 
and an article of furniture in his room ? Of an 
evening, poignant memories pull at the strings of his 
heart and ring the bells, and the whole room is vibrant. 
Let us not intrude further for very decency's sake. 



8o ON JOURNAL WRITERS 

" I have left this book locked up for the past fort- 
night," writes Eugenie de Guerin. " How many things 
in this gap that will be recorded nowhere, not even 
here!" And Fanny Burney : "There seems to me 
something very unsatisfactory in passing year after 
year without even a memorandum of what you did, 
etc." To the ego-loving diarist, to take no note of the 
flight of the present and to forget the past seems like 
a personal disloyalty to himself: it is an infamous 
defection to forget or neglect that ever-increasing 
collection of past selves — those dear dead gentlemen 
who one after another have tenanted the temple of this 
flesh and handed on the torch. His journal of self- 
chroniclings he regards as a mausoleum, where with 
reverent hands he year by year embalms the long 
dynasty of his person as it descends. To which end 
he is for ever harvesting his consciousness, anxious to 
conserve every moment of his existence, every relic of 
his passage through the world. He counts every kiss 
and every heart-beat, he collects all the hours of his 
life and hoards them up with a miserly hand and a 
connoisseur's taste. You shall And his walls hung with 
mementos, and his escritoire packed with old letters — 
and probably each annual volume of his journal bound 
in leather and stored in a fire-proof safe. The diarist 
is a great conservator. As Samuel Butler (of 
" Erewhon ") said : " One's thoughts " (and he might 
have added — one's days) " fly so fast it's no use trying 



ON JOURNAL WRITERS 8i 

to put salt on their tails." Hence came Butler's Note- 
book, and the journals of such reflective writers as 
Emerson and Thoreau, and of such methodically- 
minded men as Evelyn and John Wesley. 

* * * * ♦ 

Mr. Julius West has given a lively picture of the 
De Goncourts moving in literary France of the last 
century, " always with notebook in hand, at any rate 
metaphorically, anxious not to allow a single trait to 
escape them — ever on the alert, if not anxious to 
botanize on their mother's grave, at any rate perfectly 
willing to fasten upon the confidences of the living as 
well as of the dead, to capture the flying word, to take 
the evidences of the unforgiving minute," — with what 
results all readers of their colossal Journal know. 

It is indeed astonishing what a hold the diary habit 
gains on a man. Even as an event or conversation is 
taking place he will have it mentally trimmed and 
prepared for its exact position in the daily record, or 
his observations arranged in a mnemonic list lest they 
escape his recollection against the evening. Life 
becomes an accessory to the journal, instead of vice 
versa — just so much raw material to be caught, 
polished, and preserved. The consciousness of the 
habitual diarist develops a chronic irritability and 
instantly flicks off^ into his MS. book every tiniest 
impression, just as a horse shivers off^ the flies by 
means of that extensive muscle underneath the skin 

6 



82 ON JOURNAL WRITERS 

which anatomists have named the fanniculus carnosus. 
" Congreve's nasty wine has given me the heartburn," 
Swift records in that extraordinary fantasia of tender- 
ness and politics — the Journal to Stella. Then there 
was Patrick's bird intended for Madam Dinglibus, 
Mrs. Walls of immortal memory, Goody Stoyte and 
all the gossip. The merest bagatelle was worth its 
record. Eugenie de Guerin owned with what delight 
she described the smallest trifles, such as the little 
book lice she observed crawling in the leaves of a 
volume or on her writing-table. " I do not know their 
names," she tells us, " but we are acquaintances. . . ." 
One would say that it was a real pain to her to see any 
of her precious experiences slip out of the net for ever 
like beautiful scaly flsh. "... to describe the 
incidents of one hour" (she is voicing the despair 
expressed by so many journal writers) " would require 
an eternity." 

***** 

Journal writing where it is chiefly the impulse for 
self-expression or self-revelation is not infrequently 
fostered by uncongenial or unsympathetic surround- 
ings or by incurable misfortune. So beset, the diarist, 
timid and eager as a child, flees into the tower of his 
own soul, and raises the drawbridge, as Francis 
Thompson said of the young Shelley. 

For a journal can be used as a " grief -cheating 
device, a mode of escape and withdrawal." It is like 



ON JOURNAL WRITERS 83 

the brown eyes of some faithful hound who bears and 
suffers all and yet regards his master as supreme. It 
is a perpetual flattery, an inexhaustible cruse of oil for 
the sore and sometimes swollen ego. To keep a diary 
is to make a secret liaison of the firmest and most 
sentimental kind ; the writer can fling off all restraint 
and all the trappings which are necessarily worn to 
front the antagonism of the world. It is a monstrous 
self-indulgence wherein he remembers his friends and 
he remembers his enemies — with candour ; he 
remembers his own griefs and grievances; screened 
from the public view in the security of his own room 
he can — and it must be confessed he occasionally does 
— gaze at himself as before a mirror, remembering, 
Malvolio-like, who praised his yellow garters. 

The famous Journal Intime which ran to 17,000 
folio pages of MS. and consumed countless hours of 
its author's life, was written by a man who realized 
that he had been " systematically and deliberately 
isolated " — " premature despair and deepest discour- 
agement have been my constant portion." Marie 
Bashkirtseff also was driven into the subterranean 
existence of journal writer by the hard facts of her 
short life, towards the end of it, living more and more 
within its pages and thus, in the end, wringing out of 
a stubborn destiny her indefeasible claims to recogni- 
tion. " I do not know why writing has become a 
necessity to me," muses the tragic sister of Maurice de 



84 ON JOURNAL WRITERS 

Guerin — himself a tragedy and a journal writer. 
" Who understands this overflowing of my soul, this 
need to reveal itself before God, before someone ?" 
« ♦ « « » 

In reading subjectively written diaries one con- 
stantly comes across the expression of this same desire 
for self-revelation and self-surrender. Incredible as it 
appears to the ordinary secretive human being, this 
very common kind of diarist longs to give himself 
away, to communicate himself to some other person 
in toto; with pathetic gesture the passionate creature 
offers himself up for scrutiny, sick of his own secret 
self, anxious to be swallowed up in somebody else's 
total comprehension. 

" On dit," wrote Maurice de Guerin under date 
March 23rd, 1834, " qu'au jugement dernier le secret 
des consciences sera revele a tout Tunivers : je 
voudrais qu'il en fut ainsi de moi des aujourd'hui et 
que la vue de mon ame fut ouverte a tous venants." 

Such journals are in nowise comparable with the 
confessions of religious journals — among saintly 
women always a favourite mode of unburdening them- 
selves — pale crepuscular souls fluttering through pages 
of self-disparagement by the aid of the lamp and a 
copious inkhorn, never intended for the public view. 
" Whenever the last trumpet shall sound, I will present 
myself before the sovereign Judge with this book in 
my hand and loudly proclaim, ' Thus have I acted. 



ON JOURNAL WRITERS 85 

these were my thoughts, such was L' " This memor- 
able opening to Rousseau's Confessions, which shocked 
John Morley for its "dreadful exaltation," is the 
typical brag in most journals of Confession. With 
defiant pride of personality, Marie Bashkirtseff, in 
her marvellous volume of self-portraiture, constantly 
emphasizes for her readers that she conceals nothing : 
" I not only say all the time what I think, but I never 
contemplate hiding for an instant what might make 
me appear ridiculous or prove to my disadvantage. 
For the rest I think myself too admirable for censure." 

Passionate egotism knows no shame. Everything 
— however scandalous — goes down in a self-revelation, 
beside which the little disclosures of essayists like 
Montaigne, Lamb, De Quincey sink to the level of dull 
propriety. Voltaire said of Rousseau that he 
wouldn't mind being hanged if they stuck his name on 
the gibbet. I suppose to the average man Raskolnikoff 
in " Crime and Punishment," moving to his confession 
with the inevitableness almost of an animal tropism, 
is easier to understand than, say, Strindberg, the 
author of that terrible book, "The Confessions of a 
Fool," or even Pepys, whose diary of peccadilloes and 
little vanities was certainly written down in cypher, 
but only to conceal them from his wife. 

* ♦ * ♦ ♦ 

The introspective diarist is almost a type by himself, 
distinguished by his psychological insight and cold 



86 ON JOURNAL WRITERS 

scientific analysis of himself. Of these Amiel stands 
easily at the head. " For a psychologist," he writes in 
the Journal Intime, " it is extremely interesting to be 
readily and directly conscious of the complications of 
one's own organism and the play of its several parts. 
... A feeling like this makes personal existence a 
perpetual astonishment and curiosity. Instead of 
only seeing the world around me, I analyze myself. 
Instead of being single, all of a piece, I become legion, 
multitude, a whirlwind — a very cosmos." Amiel's self- 
consciousness was an enormous lens and, like other 
microscopists, he found worlds within worlds, and as 
much complexity and finish in small as in great. 

The passion of the introspecter is for truth of self. 
He should be full of curiosity about himself and quiet 
self-raillery, delighting to trip himself up in some little 
vanity, to track down some carefully secreted motive, 
to quizz and watch himself live with horrible vigilance 
and complete self-detachment. He must be his own 
detective and footpad, his own eavesdropper and his 
own stupid Boswell. His books should be La 
Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere, and one of his 
favourite occupations to measure himself alongside 
other men. Marie Bashkirtseff thought she was like 
Jules Valles, of whom she had read in Zola. " But," 
she adds the next instant, " we look so stupid when we 
appraise ourselves like that." It was the same agile 
self-consciousness which discovered to her while 



ON JOURNAL WRITERS 8; 

weeping before a mirror the right expression for her 
Magdalen, who should look " not at the sepulchre but 
at nothing at all." Amiel, too, gathered hints for self- 
elucidation, especially in the eternal self-chroniclings 
of Maine de Biran, in whose diary he thought to see 
himself reflected, though he also found differences 
which cheered and consoled him. 

* * * * * 

Yet this way madness lies. For too complete a 
divorce from self provokes self-antipathy, too great a 
preoccupation with self leads to self-sickness and by 
the strangest paradox egotism to self-annihilation. 



THE PASSION FOR PERPETUATION* 

Just as the ancient hunter shot a fish with a spear, 
so we may imagine the ancient philosopher separated 
the Thing, caught it up out of the Heracleitean flux 
and transfixed it with a name. With this first great pre- 
servative came the first great museum of language and 
logical thought. Ever since, we have been feverishly 
busy collecting, recording, and preserving the universe, 
or as much of it as is accessible. Perpetuation has 
become an all-absorbing passion. 

It is only recently that certain interesting, not to 
say remarkable, refinements in the technique of the 
art have been developed and come into common use, 
such being, for example, the museum, the printing- 
press, the camera, the cinema film, the gramophone 
record. By the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans, 
the desire to collect, and above all to conserve, the 
moveable furniture of the Earth was only indistinctly 
felt. As storehouses, museums were almost unknown. 
Small collections were made, but merely as the 
mementos of a soldier's campaign, or a mariner's 
curiosities, like the " gorilla " skins brought home from 
Africa by Hanno. 

* Reprinted from Science Progress. 
89 



90 THE PASSION FOR PERPETUATION 

The assembling of curiosities, drawing-room curios, 
bric-a-brac, and objets de vertu, was still the immature 
purpose of the conservator, even so late as the days of 
Sir Hans Sloane, Elias Ashmole, and John Hunter. 
Ashmole's gift to the University of Oxford was 
laconically described as "twelve cartloads of curios." 
Hunter's Museum, as everyone knows, was a gorgeous 
miscellany of stuffed birds, mammals, reptiles, fossils, 
plants, corals, shells, insects, bones, anatomical prepar- 
ations, injected vascular preparations, preparations of 
hollow viscera, mercurial injections, injections in ver- 
milion, minerals, coins, pictures, weapons, coats of 
mail. It is obvious that in those days the collector 
had not passed beyond the miscellany stage. Accord- 
ing to his pleasure, he selected say a Japanese 
midzuire, a Scarab of Rameses IL, a porpentine's quill, 
a hair from the Grand Cham's beard, and saw the 
world as an inexhaustible Bagdad Bazaar. Now he 
sees it as exhaustible, and is grimly determined to 
exhaust it as soon as may be. 

To-day everything is changed. Mankind is astride 
the globe from pole to pole, like Arion on the dolphin's 
back. With all the departments of human knowledge 
clearly mapped out in the likeness of his own mind, 
man now occupies himself with collecting and filling 
in the details. He ransacks heaven and earth, armies 
of collectors, brigaded under the different sciences and 
arts, labour incessantly for the salvation of the globe. 



THE PASSION FOR PERPETUATION 91 

All objects are being named, labelled, and kept in 
museums; all the facts are being enshrined in the 
libraries of books. We are embarked on an amazing 
undertaking. A well-equipped modern expedition 
apparently leaves nothing behind in the territory 
traversed save its broad physical features; and as 
Mont Blanc or the Andes cannot be moved even by 
scientific Mahomets, the geologist's hammer deftly 
breaks off a chip, and the fragment is carried off in 
triumph to the cabinet as a sample. 

It is estimated that there are about seven millions 
of distinct species of insects, and naturalists the world 
over have entered upon a solemn league and covenant 
to catch at least one specimen of every kind which 
shall be pinned and preserved in perpetuity for as 
long as one stone shall stand upon another in the 
kingdom of man. There are already an enormous 
number of such types, as they are professionally 
called, not only of insects, but of all classes of animals 
and plants, jealously guarded and conserved by the 
zealous officials of the British Museum. 

***** 
When I was a small boy I greedily saved up the 
names of naval vessels and inscribed each with a fair 
round hand in a MS. book specially kept for the 
purpose. Now the financial or aesthetic motives that 
may be said to govern the boy collector of postage 
stamps, birds' eggs, cigarette cards must here be ruled 



92 THE PASSION FOR PERPETUATION 

out of court. For if half-a-dozen of the rarest unused 
surcharged Mauritius, a complete set of Wills' 
" Cathedrals " or Players' " Inventions," or a single 
blood alley of acknowledged virtue minister to the 
tingling acquisitiveness of the average schoolboy, it is 
difficult to say the same of the hunting down in news- 
papers and books of battle-ships, cruisers, and 
T.B.D.'s. At least I am inclined to think that my 
subconscious motive was a fear lest any of His 
Majesty's ships should be overlooked or lost, that it 
was indeed a good example of the instinct for simple 
conservation uncomplicated by the usual motives of 
the collector. 

The joy of possession, the greed, vanity and self- 
aggrandizement of the collector proper, are deftly sub- 
verted to the use of the explorer and conservator of 
knowledge who, having a weak proprietorial sense — 
bloodless, anaemic it must seem to the enthusiastic 
connoisseur — is satisfied so long as somewhere by 
someone Things are securely saved. The purpose of 
the archconservator — his whole design and the 
rationale of his art — is to redeem, embalm, dry, cure, 
salt, pickle, pot every animal, vegetable and mineral, 
every stage in the history of the universe from 
nebular gas or planetismals down to the latest and 
most insignificant event reported in the newspapers. 
He would like to treat the globe as the experimental 
embryologist treats an egg — to preserve it whole in 



THE PASSION FOR PERPETUATION 93 

every hour of its development and then section it with 
a microtome. 

* * ♦ * * 

People who are not in the habit of visiting or con- 
sidering Museums fail to realize how prodigiously 
within recent times the zeal for conservation, or as 
Sir Thomas Browne puts it — the diuturnity of relics 
has increased all over the world in every centre of 
civilization. A constant stream of objects flows into 
the great treasuries of human inheritance — about 
400,000 separate objects per annum being received 
into the British Museum in Bloomsbury, and there is 
scarcely a capital in Europe or a big town in America 
in which congestion is not already being felt. 

In a Museum you shaU find not only the loin cloth 
or feathers of the savage, but an almost perfect series 
of costumes worn by man down through the ages in 
any country. Man's past in particular is preserved 
with the tenderest care. It is possible to go and, with 
the utmost pride and self-satisfaction, observe the 
milestones of man's progress from the arrowhead to 
the modern rifle, from the Sedan-chair and hobby- 
horse to the motor cycle and aeroplane, from the 
spinning-wheel to the modern loom, from the Caxton 
printing-press to the linotype, from Stephenson's 
Rocket to the railway express engine, from the coracle 
to the latest ocean greyhound in miniature. It is all 
there : china, tobacco pipes, door handles, iron rail- 



94 THE PASSION FOR PERPETUATION 

ings, bedsteads, clavichords, buttons, lamps, vases, 
sherds, bones, Babylonian and Hittite tablets, the 
Moabite stone, the autographs and MSS. of everyone 
who was anybody since writing came into common 
practice, scarabs and coins, scarabs of the Rameses 
and Amenheteps, coins of Greece and Rome, coins of 
Arabia, coins of Cyrenaica, coins from Colophon, 
Tyre, Sidon, — Nineveh's Winged Bulls. 

I knew a police inspector who saved and docketed 
the cigar ashes of Royalties, and I once heard of a 
distinguished chiropodist who saved their nail 
parings. Mr. Pierpont Morgan owns the largest 
collection of watches in the world, and another 
American is the proud possessor of the only complete 
collection of " Crusoes " in existence — i.e.^ the editions 
of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. 

***** 

But not only is the past retrieved in fragments; in 
some Museums and Exhibitions and to a certain 
extent in historical plays, it is actually reconstructed : 
in London is displayed the interior of an apothecary's 
shop in the seventeenth century with its crocodile and 
bunches of herbs, or the shop of a barber surgeon, or 
a reconstruction of the laboratory used by Liebig, or 
the Bromley Room, or Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in 
exact facsimile, or Solomon's Temple, while for the 
purposes of illustration. Madam Tussaud's must for 
the moment be classed with the Pantheon. The 



THE PASSION FOR PERPETUATION 95 

cinema is going to keep alive the persons and events 
of the present generation within the most sluggish 
imaginations of the next — for the benefit of those who 
perhaps don't read history or visit Museums. This 
need not mean the gradual atrophy of the imagination 
as some Solomon Eagles portend — to discuss which 
would mean a digression. In any case, I fancy the 
most lively imagination would scarcely ignore the 
opportunity of seeing Dr. Johnson, let us say, walk 
down Fleet Street tapping each lamp-post with his 
stick, if an authentic film of him were in existence, or 
of listening to a gramophone record of Rachel or 
Edmund Burke. 

Wherever one turns, it is easy to see this thriving 
instinct of the human heart. There are enthusiastic 
leagues for preserving woods, forests, footpaths, 
commons, trees, plants, animals, ancient buildings, 
historical sites. In times to come, nearly every private 
house in London will have historical connections and 
bear a commemorative tablet. In anticipation of its 
extinction the hansom cab has already been lodged 
behind the portals of its last depository. Everywhere 
enthusiasts are expending a vast amount of energy in 
inducing people to stick to the old — pedants will have, 
you use the old idioms and spellings, the language 
must be preserved in its original beauty; no ancient 
rite or custom can be allowed to lapse into desuetude 
but some cry of reprobation goes up to Heaven in 



96 THE PASSION FOR PERPETUATION 

righteous anger. There are anniversaries, centenaries, 
bicentenaries, tercentenaries — glutinous tercentenaries ! 



Perhaps the most valuable instrument for perpetua- 
tion is tlie printing-press. No sooner is an event over, 
than it is reported in the daily press, and the news- 
paper preserved in the British Museum for all time. 
In future there will be no historical lacunae. In virtue 
of our elaborate precautions it is improbable that 
London will ever become a second Nineveh. Imme- 
diately a discovery is made or a research brought to 
its conclusion the world is copiously informed. In the 
present era of publicity, we need never fear that a 
man's secrets will die with him. It were safe to 
prophesy that there will never be another Mrs. Stopes, 
for the good reason that his contemporaries will never 
let a second Shakespeare slip through their fingers so 
to speak. A lament like the scholar's over the loss of 
the Diakosmos of Demokritus will probably never be 
heard again. Within the sacred rotunda of the 
British Museum Reading Room may be perused the 
novels of Charles Garvice as well as the great Chinese 
Encyclopaedia prepared for the Emperor K'ang-hi in 
5,020 volumes. 

In books our knowledge to date is rounded up and 
displayed : you can read a book on a lump of coal, a 
grass blade, a sea worm, on hair combs, carpets, ships, 
sticks, sealing wax, cabbages, kings, cosmetics, Kant. 



THE PASSION FOR PERPETUATION 97 

A very thick volume indeed was published last year 
upon the anatomy of the thorax of the field cricket. 
It would require a learned man to catalogue the 
literature that deals with such comparatively trivial 
subjects as the History of the Punch and Judy Show, 
or the History of Playing Cards. 

At the present rapid rate of accumulation, the time 
must come when the British Museum, thousands of 
years hence, will occupy an area as large as London 
and the " Encyclopaedia Britannica " be housed in a 
building as big as the Crystal Palace : an accumulation 
of learning to make Aristotle and Scaliger turn pale. 

For let us not forget that man is only at the 
beginning of things. The first Egyptian dynasty 
began 7000 B.C. and we are now only in A.D. 1916. 
Every day sees the birth of entirely new things that 
must be collected and preserved, new babies, new 
wars, new books, new discoveries, so that — to take a 
moderate figure — by 3000 A.D. we shall have saved up 
such a prodigious quantity of the relics and minutiae 
of the past that only a relatively small fraction of it 
will be contained in the united consciousness of the 
men of that time. Everything will be there and 
accessible, but for reference only. Knowledge will be 
an amazing organization (let us hope it will be done 
better than the Poor Law System), and battalions of 
men of the intellectual lineage of Diderot and 
D'Alembert will be continuously occupied in sifting 

7 



98 THE PASSION FOR PERPETUATION 

and arranging our stores of information, whereby the 
curious, by handing a query over the counter, will be 
given all the knowledge in existence in any particular 
subject. Yet for the most part human knowledge will 
be left stranded high and dry in books : entombed, 
embalmed, labelled, and clean forgotten — unless the 

human brain becomes hypertrophied. 

* * * * ♦ 

Conservation is a natural tendency of the mind. 
One might lay down a certain law of the conservation 
of consciousness to indicate our extreme repugnance to 
the idea of anything passing clean away into the void. 
What insinuating comfort in those words that every 
hair of our heads is numbered ! 

True, the chain of causation is unbroken, and in a 
sense every effect is the collection and preservation of 
all its past causes ; and if to live can be said to exist 
in results, then no man ever dies, and no thought can 
perish, and every act is infinite in its consequences. 
Yet I fancy this transcendental flourish will not 
satisfy the brotherhood of Salvationists, who desire to 
possess something more than the means embodied 
abstractly in the result; no consideration will ever 
cause them to abate one jot their feverish labours to 
forestall their common enemies : Cormorant devouring 
Time, man's own leaky memory, Death's abhorred 
shears, the Futurist, the Hun, the Vandal, the Carrion 

worm or the Devil. 

« « « « « 



THE PASSION FOR PERPETUATION 99 

The instinct for conservation in different men has 
different origins. To the scientific man, Nature is 
higgledy-piggledy, until she is collected, classified, 
stored, and explained according to his own scheme; 
every phenomenon, unobserved or imperfectly compre- 
hended, escapes and flows past him, defeating his 
will to understand. In politics conservatism means 
a distrust of the unknown future suited to a comfort- 
able habituation to current customs and current 
statecraft, or — to quote Fluellen — the ceremonies of it 
and the cares of it and the forms of it and the sobriety 
of it and the modesty of it. In still another direction, 
the desire to conserve is simply a sentiment for the old, 
for the old unhappy, far-off things. The flight of 
time, its likeness to a running stream, the great world 
spinning down the grooves of change, endless change 
and decay, have been food for the melancholy rumina- 
tions of philosophers and poets from the earliest 
times. " Tout ce qui fut un jour et n'est plus 
aujourd'hui incline a la tristesse surtout ce qui fut 
tres beau et tres heureux," says Maeterlinck. 

But regard for the old is not always vague senti- 
ment alone. In one of his essays, Emerson remarks 
that Nature often turns to ornament what she once 
employed for use, illustrating his suggestion with 
certain sea shells, in which the parts which have for a 
time formed the mouth are at the next whorl of growth 
left behind as decorative nodes and spines. Subse- 



loo THE PASSION FOR PERPETUATION 

quently, Herbert Spencer applied the idea to human 
beings, remarking how the material exuviae of past 
social states become the ornaments of the present — 
for example, ruined castles, old rites and ceremonies, 
old earthenware water- jars. The explanation of this 
metamorphosis simply is that so long as a thing is 
useful, its beauty goes for the most part unobserved. 
Beauty is the pursuit of leisure, and it was probably 
in those rhythmic periods of relaxation when the 
primitive potter or stone carver paused from his 
labour that the aesthetic sense according to some was 
given birth. 

« « « « « 

Now it is certain that there be some to whom the 
perpetuation of Stonehenge or the Diplodocus is a 
matter of large indifference, in whom arises no joy in 
the fruits of the conservator's art upon handling say a 
Syracusan tetradrachm or a folio of Shakespeare with 
" the excessively rare title-page * for Richard 
Meighen.' " Yet over the question of self-perpetuation 
these same men will be as desirous as others. Few 
men save Buddhists relish the idea of self-extinction. 
No one likes the thought of the carrion worm in the 
seat of intellect. The Egyptians bravely fought the 
course of Nature and gained some solace we may 
assume by embalming. Christians if they resign 
themselves to the decay of the body, labour in its 
stead to save the soul. On his death, every man at 



THE PASSION FOR PERPETUATION loi 

least claims a tombstone. The surface of the earth is 
stippled with crosses (especially in France), with 
monuments, obelisks, mausoleums, pyramids, ceno- 
taphs, tombs, tumuli, barrows, cairns designed to 
keep evergreen the memory of the dead, to forestall 
oblivion lurking like a ghoul in the background. 
Look at Keats's naive preoccupation with his future 
fame, his passionate desire to be grouped among the 
heirs of all eternity. If we are to believe Shakespeare 
and the Elizabethan sonneteers their common obses- 
sion was to combat brass and stone with their own 
immortal lines. 

No doubt there are a few apparently sincere, high- 
minded gentlemen ("Rocky Mountain toughs "William 
James calls them) who emphatically declare that when 
they die they will, after cremation, have their ashes 
scattered to the winds of heaven,* who scoff at the 
salvation of their souls and quote Haeckel's jibe about 
God as " a gaseous vertebrate," who are indifferent to 
fame and spurn monuments that live no longer than 

* In accordance with his wishes, the body of Samuel Butler 
(of "Erewhon^') was cremated and the ashes buried near some 
shrubs in the garden of the crematorium with nothing to mark 
the spot. Sir Thomas Browne said that at his death he meant 
to take a total adieu of the world, " not caring for a Monument, 
Historie, or Epitaph, not so much as the bare memory of my 
name to be found anywhere but in the universal Register of 
God." But, as a matter of fact, he was given a brass coiBn- 
plate (with a curious inscription that has afforded matter for 
antiquarian controversy) as well as a mural monument. 



102 THE PASSION FOR PERPETUATION 

the bell rings and the widow weeps. In short, since 
conservation must always be o'erswayed by sad mor- 
tality in the long run, they will have nothing of it. 
" Give me my scallop shell of quiet," they would say — 
and let the world pass on its primrose way to the 
everlasting bonfire. 

But conservation cannot be so summarily set aside. 
Every man, willy-nilly, collects and preserves, his 
consciousness is of itself an automatic collecting 
instrument. The alert mind collects observations and 
impressions without being conscious of them. Then, 
later, when the note is struck, to our surprise they rise 
up into vision as if from nowhere. The memory is a 
preservative. After a life of it a man's mind is a 
Museum, a palimpsest, a hold-all. In the heyday of 
manhood we may perhaps go adventuring on in 
lavish expenditure of life, nomads, careless of the day 
as soon as it is over. Yet he must be a very rare bird 
indeed, the veteran who when all the wheels are run 
down does not choose to write his memoirs or even to 
relate reminiscences around the fireside, the broken 
soldier who never shoulders his crutch, the barrister 
who never recalls his first brief. Two old men will 
haggle with one another over the fixation of a date, 
they will pull up a conversation and everyone must 
wait on account of a forgotten name. . . . This 
morning I was delighted to hear myself burst out 
whistling a nocturne of Chopin, which I have not 
heard for twelve months, and then for the first time. 



THE PASSION FOR PERPETUATION 103 

I confess it was pleasant to think I had been enter- 
taining an angel unawares all these months, and I like 
to believe that in the all too swift trajectory of one's 
career through life, nothing is really left behind, that 
all the phantasmagoria of our life which seems to be 
passing us by on each side for ever falls into line 
behind with the rest and follows on like a comet's tail. 
Much may be forgotten, yet nothing perhaps is ever 
lost; no impression once photographed upon the mind 
ever becomes obliterated — comfortable words, I appre- 
hend, for the benefit of any diarist whose eyes these 
lines may catch. According to William James's 
attractive " world-memory " idea, the whole history of 
the Earth actually exists and some occultists indeed 
claim to have tapped such inaccessible material as life 
on the extinct continent of Atlantis or in Knossos. 
« « * » « 

In 1768, Fanny Burney made this entry in her 
Journal : " I cannot express the pleasure I have in 
writing down my thoughts at the very moment . . . 
and I am much deceived in my foresight if I shall not 
have very great delight in reading this living proof of 
my manner of passing my time . . . there is some- 
thing to me very unsatisfactory in passing year after 
year without even a memorandum of what you did- 
etc." This is the true spirit of the habitual diarist 
speaking. At heart, everyone is a diarist. There is 
no child who has not kept a diary at some time or 
another, and there is no one who having given it up 



104 THE PASSION FOR PERPETUATION 

has not regretted it later on. The confirmed journal 
writer, however, possesses a psychology not altogetlier 
comnion, being one of tliose few persons who truly 
appraise tlie beauty, interest, and value of the present 
without having to wait until memory has lent the past 
its cliromatic fringe. 

When his youth died, wrote George Moore about 
his " Confessions of a Young Man," the soul of the 
ancient Egyptians awoke in him. He had the idea of 
conserving his dead past in a work of art, embalming 
It witli pious care in a memorial, he hoped, as durable 
as die pyramids of Rameses 11. ! Poor George Moore ! 

It is strange that so man\' gallant knights clad in 
tlie armour of steely determination should fight on, 
unthinking, against such overwhelming odds. For the 
conservators in trying to dam back time, in resisting 
change and decay vsTestle with the stars in their 
courses and dispute the very constitution of the 
universe. But the imperative instinct must be obeyed. 
The ominous warnings of Sir Thomas Browne are 
unavailing. " There is no antidote for the opium of 
time." 'Gravestones tell truth but a year." "We 
might just as well be content with six feet as with the 
moles of Adrianus." And "to subsist but in bones 
and be but pyramidally extant is a fallac>- in dura- 
tion." To erect a monument is like trying to fix a 
stick into tlie bed of the Niagara. No memorial as 
large and wonderful as the Taj Mahal can stay the 
passage of a grief, no pen can preserve an emotion 



THE PASSION FOR PERPETUATION 105 

held for a while in the sweet shackles of a sonnet's 
rules. Neither pen nor brush nor chisel knows the art 
of perpetuation. 

As the torrent races past, frantic hands stretch out 
to snatch some memento from the flood — a faded 
letter, an old concert programme, a bullet, the railway 
labels jealously preserved on travellers* portmanteaux, 
a lock of hair. "Only a woman's hair," said Swift in 
the bitterness of his heart as he handled .Stella's tress. 

There are some things we can never hope to recall, 
even so long as the world lasts, except by divination 
or Black Magic. The hopeless science of Palaeon- 
tology offers its students no tiniest ray of comfort — a 
Pterodactyl, a Dinosaur or an Archaeopteryx will 
never be disclosed to us in the flesh. There are many 
things lost for ever : Who was the Man in the iron 
mask ? or the author of the Letters of Junius ? or 
Mr. W. H. ? — the precious library burnt at Louvain ? 
And so on by the score. 

" All is vanity, feeding the wind and folly. Mummy 

is become merchandize, Mizraim cures wounds, and 

Pharaoh is sold for balsams " — to borrow once more 

from Sir Thomas Browne's organ music. 

" Tarry awhile lean earth ! 
Rabble of Pharaohs and Arsacidae 
Keep their cold court within thee ; thou hast sucked 

down 
How many Ninevehs and Hecatompyloi 
And perished cities whose great phantasmata 
O'erbrow the silent citizens of Dis." 



io6 THE PASSION FOR PERPETUATION 

Life is expenditure. We must always be paying 
away. It is sad to behold the conservators — ecstatic 
hearts — following like eager camp followers in the 
trail of the whirlwind, collecting and saving the frag- 
ments so as to work them up into some pitiful history, 
poem, biography, monograph, or memorial. 

Why pursue this hopeless task ? What is the use in 
being precious and saving ? Nature wastes a thousand 
seeds, experiments lightly with whole civilizations, 
and has abandoned a thousand planets that cycle in 
space forgotten and cold. Both collection and recol- 
lection are insufficient. The only perfect preservation 
is re-creation. Surely our zeal for conservation be- 
tokens a miserly close-fisted nature in us. It cannot 
be very magnanimous on our part to be so precious, 
since God and Nature are on the side of waste. Let 
us squander our life and energy in desire, love, 
experience. And, since so it is to be, let us without 
vain regrets watch the universe itself be squandered 
on the passing years, on earthquakes, and on wars. 
The world is an adventurer, and we try to keep him 
at home — in a Museum. Let us not be niggardly over 
our planet nor over ourselves. 

Yet it is easy but fatuous to sit at a writing desk 
and make suggestions for the alteration of human 
nature. Conservation is as deeply rooted as 
original sin. 

1916. 



POSSESSION 

Passionate love demands passionate possession, yet 
no beautiful thing has ever yielded to man's desires. 
There is no true love short of possession, and no true 
possession short of eating. Every lover is a beast of 
ravin, every Romeo would be a cannibal if he dared. 
G. K. Chesterton somewhere says that in the Geological 
Museum there are certain rich crimson marbles, certain 
split stones of blue and green that made him wish his 
teeth were stronger. 

The seat of the affections is not the heart but the 
stomach. My beautiful tabby cat coiled up asleep in 
the chair makes my mouth water. To watch the old 
Guernsey cow in the field behind the house, curling its 
Ibving tongue around the grass and clover and 
scrunching them up into a green bolus gives me a real 
hunger. I would like to take up the grass and flowers 
by intussusception into my blood. 

Man loves and is an hungered from the cradle 
onwards. The Mother says to the Baby, " Oh ! I 
could eat you," and the baby tries its appetite on the 
brass knobs of door handles, pieces of coal, paint- 

107 



io8 POSSESSION 

brushes — every object in its blinding novelty, and 
beauty is passed swiftly to the mouth. 

Sir Thomas Browne wrote quaintly that "united 
souls are not satisfied with embraces, but desire to be 
truly each other." I gazed this morning with devour- 
ing eyes upon the magnificent torso of a high forest 
beech-tree. I wanted to embrace it, seize, possess. I 
could have flung my arms around its smooth, fascinat- 
ing body, but the austerity of the great creature 
forbade it. In imagination I struggled to project 
myself into its lithe, strong body, to feel its splendid 
erectness in my own bones and its electric sap, vitaliz- 
ing my frame to the finger tips. Very wisely, a painter 
once told Emerson that no one could draw a tree 
without in some measure becoming a tree. Maurice de 
Gu^rin, whose sympathy with Nature was profound, 
said he envied " la vie forte et muette qui regne sous 
r^corce des chenes." 

After lunch, I walked along by a hedge on the out- 
skirts of a wood — and could see them inside — an 
enormous crowd of tens of thousands. They were on 
tiptoe, peering out at me over the top of the hedge 
as I stood peering in at them : we stood in silent 
antagonism. In the wood itself, it gave me a pleasur- 
able sense of affluence to stride like Gulliver among 
these countless hordes of blue Lilliputians. Of my 
Bluebell Wood, an artist would have said that it was 
an " interesting colour scheme " or a " suggestive 



POSSESSION 109 

arrangement." But there are days when such com- 
placency is very exasperating. Here is a bluebell in 
my hand, full of beauty and full of terror for me. If I 
look at it till my eyes bulge, if I crush it up in my fist, 
eat it, its beauty will defy me and threaten me still. 

Those two supreme torments to the hungry heart — 
mountains and the sea ! A mountain is a lodestone, 
I run to it, I would flatten my nose against it, be- 
spatter its rocks with that inconsiderable piece of 
matter which composes my body. The sea gives me a 
mighty thirst, I could drain it to its oozy lees. I 
surrender myself to the sea and plunge among the 
waves which sadly, inevitably cast me back upon the 
strand. I lie out upon the sand in the sun, I should 
like to be branded deep in the flesh by the sun, I 
would offer myself as an oblation to the God of the 
Sun. I could swallow landscapes and swill down 
sunsets, or grapple the whole earth to me with hoops 
of steel. But the world is so impassive, silent, secret. 

It is a relief to drop a pebble into the salmon pool 
on a still June day, or to see the tall meadow grass 
falling in swathes as I brandish my sickle. Inscrut- 
able matter ! — " Take that," I whisper, and split open 
the boulders with a hammer. 

What insane satisfaction may be got from lighting 
a fire ! I love to let loose the tiger of fire upon a heap 
of sticks, I could fire the whole wood, the rick, the 
farmhouse, the town. It would be my revenge on 



no POSSESSION 

inscrutable matter for being inscrutable, on beauty for 
not explaining herself. 

Beauty is too menacing merely to contemplate. No 
one can face her without consciousness of struggle. 
She must be fought and grappled with. Man must be 
always measuring his strength with her lest she clutch 
him by the heart and he be overwhelmed. 

One afternoon, several winters ago, with the world 
cold, hard, crystalline, and the earth gripped in ice, I 
reached the top of a granite Tor, just as the sun with 
all pomp was entering its western porticoes of green 
and gold and chrysoprase. I stood alone in a wilder- 
ness of rocks and heather, having penetrated, it 
seemed, to the last outposts of mortal life and human 
understanding. On that desolate hilltop no one was 
present save me and the sun. I had the whole universe 
to myself — a flattering moment for the egotist. Now 
it seemed was the appointed hour. The moment was 
opportune, and I saw myself in a grandiose ceremony 
pressing my suit with the President of the Immortals 
before the sinking of the sun. Being on top of the hill 
was in my exhilaration like being on top of the world. 
Yet that was not high enough, and I strained to raise 
myself still higher, to pierce beyond the veil of blue 
sky above, to rise by some sort of levitation to a grand 
apocalypse. I stood still, struggling, fighting, hoping, 
striving — I almost wheedled God to tell me all. } 
held out my hands to a white sail on the sea 500 feet 



POSSESSION III 

below and sunset bound. To the sun I remonstrated : 
" You know ! Tell me before you go." But the sail 
disappeared into the sunset, and the sun sank in a 
heinous silence, leaving the horizon empty — that long, 
merciless line. I was once more thrown back upon the 
unintelligibility of the universe; only a nightjar 
whirred down among the shrubby oaks — that was all 
the answer 1 obtained. In the darkness and isolation 
of the hill-top, I grew frightened at myself and at the 
world, and walked off down the hill in a desperate 
hurry, eager for a roof to screen me from the infinite 
stars, for a human hand to shake, to pat a dog's head 
— anything to escape from this silent and menacing 
world. " The eternal silence of these infinite spaces 
frightens me," wrote Pascal. After such spiritual 
adventures, it is necessary to eat a beef-steak quickly 
in order to restore confidence in the positivist position. 
No more God for me. 



ON AMIEL AND SOME OTHERS 

Madam de StaeL decided that the country of her 
choice was "with the chosen souls." Amiel's com- 
mentary is characteristic. His own countrymen and 
his European neighbours are no more to him than the 
Brazilians or the Chinese. The illusions of patriotism, 
he tells us, of Chauvinist, of family, or of professional 
feeling-, did not exist for him. The author of the 
" Religio Medici " in a famous passage incurred 
Charles Lamb's gentle sarcasms for a similar confes- 
sion that he had no national repugnances. Lamb's 
very considerable pride of individuality exhibited 
itself in the frequent expression of his antipathies, 
apathies, sympathies, idiosyncrasies, and a "thousand 
whim-whams," which lovers of Elia know so well. He 
professed to have felt " yearnings of tenderness " 
towards some negro faces and hated Scotchmen. Now 
it is easy to be very fond of Charles Lamb. He is one 
of ourselves with like passions and emotions, and self- 
comparison with so great an artist is always flattering 
and pleasant. But two such intellectual aristocrats as 
Amiel and Sir Thomas Browne are not for popular 
consumption. 



114 ON AMIEL AND SOME OTHERS 

They were not merely cosmopolites but univers- 
alists. From the mountain fastnesses of his own mind, 
Amiel was for ever reviewing the kingdoms of this 
world, watching people like ants running hither and 
thither in pursuit of their private ends; from his 
infinite distance above he saw the finite world below, 
and thenceforward "the significance of all those 
things which men hold to be important makes effort 
ridiculous, passion burlesque, and prejudice absurd." 
With a complacency that after the anguish and tears 
of Amiel seems almost ridiculous, good Sir Thomas 
Browne expresses himself thus in a sentence known to 
everyone : " I am of a constitution," the dear man 
wrote, " so general that it comports and sympathizeth 
with all things. I have no antipathy or rather idio- 
syncrasy in diet, humour, air, anything. I wonder not 
at the French for their dishes of frogs, snails, and 
toadstools, nor at the Jews for locusts and grass- 
hoppers. ... In brief, I am averse from nothing : my 
conscience would give me the lie if I should absolutely 

detest any essence but the devil." 

Amiel possessed one of the loftiest and most 
remarkable minds in intellectual history. It was so 
immense in its compass, his mental altitude was so 
great, that throughout life he suffered from a mountain 
sickness, that " maladie de I'ideal " in M. Caro's 
phrase, and in his own that '* 6blouissement de 
J'infini" which incapacitated him from all participa- 



ON AMIEL AND SOME OTHERS 115 

tion in ordinary human affairs. To outward view, he 
was a rather dull Genevese Professor who had disap- 
pointed all his friends by his mental immobility. But 
within, his whole life was a war — a struggle to the 
death between his heart, which demanded love and 
kindly human interests, and his intellect with its 
almost unholy craving for the infinite. He was Faust 
and Hamlet in one. He could sit and conjure up 
" grandiose, immortal, cosmogonic dreams," in a state 
of volitional paralysis, unwilling to do, think, or say, 
any particular thing lest his zealously guarded 
universality should in an instant contract to the size of 
a pin's headed actuality. Action was his cross. 
Reveries and aspirations and the ravages of his Faust- 
like ambition to fetch a compass of the whole universe 
resulted in colossal ennui and self-contempt. " Life," 
he says, " is the shadow of a smoke wreath, a gesture 
in the empty air, a hieroglyph traced for an instant on 
the sand and effaced a moment later by a breath of 
wind, an air-bubble ... an appearance, a vanity, a 
nothing." And again, the wonderful simile : " Man's 
life is a soap-bubble hanging from a reed." 

In the course of a single day, he was accustomed to 
make a lightning sweep through whole fields of human 
thought and human endeavour, now thrilled into 
ecstasy, now overwhelmed and unstrung by his own 
nothingness and God's Omnipotence. " I have been 
reading a great deal," he begins a wonderful passage. 



ii6 ON AMIEL AND SOME OTHERS 

" I have traversed the universe from the deepest depths 
of the Empyrean to the peristaltic movements of the 
atoms in the elementary cell. I have felt myself 
expanding in the infinite and enfranchized in spirit 
from the bounds of time and space, able to trace back 
the whole boundless creation to a point without 
dimensions, and seeing the vast multitude of suns and 
milky ways, of stars and nebula all existent in the 
point. And on all sides stretched mysteries, marvels, 
and prodigies without limit, without number, and 
without end. ... I touched, proved, tasted, embraced 
my nothingness and my immensity ; I kissed the hem 
of the garments of God, and gave Him thanks for 
being spirit and for being life." . . . But such inspir- 
ing passages are not common in the Journal. One's 
general impression of it is the world as a sterile 
promontory, and all its uses weary, stale, flat, and 
unprofitable. It would be manifestly foolish to call 
Amiel a prig, yet he was in a literal sense too big for 
his boots. His soul, that is, was too big for his bod}- 
and suffered daily from its intolerable compression. 
His own finiteness was like a ligature round his heart, 
he gasped for a serener air than the troubled one of 
this planet, he lived in his body like a prisoner, and 
death was his escape — the translation of a soul incar- 
nated by sad mischance. 

Nobody supposes Amiel was alone in his heart 
sickness. Everyone, at times of spiritual unrest. 



ON AMIEL AND SOME OTHERS 117 

shakes out his wings and tries to fly, only to And that 
mortahty is a cage with strong bars. But Amiel is 
remarkable in the intensity of his suffering. The 
malady debilitated his intellect, sterilized his un- 
doubted genius, immobilized his eager and devouring 
life. For underneath his lassitude smouldered a 
passion for life as intense as Walt Whitman's. "A 
passionate desire to live, to feel, to express, stirred the 
depths of my heart. ... It was as though something 
explosive had caught Are and one's soul scattered to 
the four winds. In such a mood, one would fain 
devour the whole world, experience everything, see 
everything." 

The sentiment for universality in different persons 
has curiously diverse results. In Amiel it produced 
lethargy, and this condition is perhaps not uncommon 
m greater or lesser degree among intellectual Russians. 
In Goncharov's novel, Oblomov is depicted prostrate 
beneath the weight of his inappeasable desires and an 
ebullient vie intime. Edward FitzGerald was possessed 
of the same infirmity of purpose, the same indolence, 
the same acute and sceptical mind, the same languor 
and irresolution as Amiel, with the one inconsiderable 
difference that Amiel was a Christian and Hegelian 
and FitzGerald was a Pagan. 

But the hallmark of the universalist is his lust of 
life. He wants everything, and he wants it at once. 
The languorous Amiel admits that he discovered it 



ii8 ON AMIEL AND SOME OTHERS 

easier to give up a wish than to satisfy it, and so not 
being able to satisfy all his nature longed for he 
renounced the whole en bloc. But where Amiel stood 
on the brink, introspected, hesitated, and drew back, 
Walt Whitman, a universalist -par excellence^ plunged 
voraciously and voluptuously into Nature's treasures. 
. . . It is an unpleasant trick which certain critics 
have of describing men in terms of the pathologist. 
But in drawing attention to the fundamental likeness 
between Amiel and Whitman it would be a mistake to 
overlook their fundamental difference: Amiel's low 
health — the misery of being continuously undermined 
in strength and energy — and Whitman's high opsonic 
index. Walt Whitman's desire of life hounded him 
along his existence — everything was caught hold of, 
seized a moment in turn and nothing was enough to 
satisfy. His chain lists, his lightning traverses across 
the world of consciousness, his tireless but vain efforts 
to compass the earth and to embrace all made R. L. 
Stevenson a little petulantly remark : " He wishes to 
knock the four corners of the universe one after the 
other about his readers' ears. His whole life is to him 
what it was to Sir Thomas Browne, one perpetual 
miracle. Everything is strange, everything unaccount- 
able, everything beautiful, from a bug to the moon, 
from the sight of the eyes to the appetite for food." 
One can detect in the passage a trace of the English- 
man's quiet amusement at American deportment, and 



ON AMIEL AND SOME OTHERS 119 

certainly no universalist whose mind is like a " hold- 
all" can expect to win approval from the fastidious 
critic who rejects and selects. 

" It seems to me," writes that wonderful Russian girl 
Marie Bashkirtseff, " that no one loves everything as 
I do — the fine arts, music, painting, books, society, 
dress, luxury, excitement, calm, laughter and tears, 
love, melancholy, humbug, the snow and sunshine. 
... I admire, I adore it all. ... I should like to see, 
possess, embrace it all, be absorbed in it, and die, since 
I must in two years or in thirty — die in an ecstasy in 
order to analyse this final mystery, this end of all or 
this beginning." She is avid of all learning and reads 
everything (including the '* De Rerum Natural"). 
She works in a fever, greedy of every hour. She wants 
a dozen lives, so as to sample a dozen different 
existences. " I envy learned men, even those who are 
yellow, emaciated, and ugly." — " To marry and have 
children — any washerwoman could do that !" screams 
this young person. 

Another consumptive gives similar but still more 
forcible expression to his ferocious hunger for life. In 
"The Story of my Heart" Richard Jefferies reveals 
himself thus : " I envy Semiramis. I would be ten 
times Semiramis. I envy Nero because of the great 
concourse of beauty that he saw. I should like to be 
loved by every beautiful woman on earth, from the 
swart Nubian to the white and divine Greek." But 



120 ON AMIEL AND SOME OTHERS 

his strength is not enough to gratify his desire. " If I 
had the strength of the ocean and of the earth, the 
burning vigour of the sun implanted in my limbs, it 
would hardly suffice to gratify the measureless desire 
of life which possesses me. And if it were possible to 
live again " (and he directly recalls Marie Bashkirtseff 
quoted above), " it would be exquisite to die, pushing 
the eager breast against the sword." In short, to quote 
Amiel again, " I love everything, and detest one thing 
only — the hopeless imprisonment of my being within 
a single arbitrary form even were it chosen by 
myself." 

The difference between Amiel and these others is 
almost solely one of emphasis. The one laid stress on 
his hopeless insatiety, and the others on their infinite 
desires. Marie Bashkirtseff and Richard Jefferies with 
feverish vigour throw out their challenging desires, 
and rush on without lingering for answer or for echo. 
Amiel is full of repining, and cannot accept his fate. 

At first sight it may seem an odd partnership, but 
beyond all doubt Amiel, Walt Whitman, Richard 
Jefferies (in his last book). Sir Thomas Browne, and 
the little Russian girl Marie Bashkirtseff, possessed 
something in common and something vital. All of 
them were powerful centrifugal forces rushing away 
from themselves in an incontinent desire for the whole 
universe. There is one further point of close resem- 
blance — perhaps correlative with the other — especially 



ON AMIEL AND SOME OTHERS 121 

noticeable as between Amiel and Richard Jefferies, 
whom at times a certain cold stark wonder at the 
beauty and mystery of the world gripped so strongly 
as to shake the very pillars of their minds. The 
following parallel quotations will show : 

" There are days when all these details seem to me 
a dream, when I wonder at the desk under my hand, 
at my body itself, when I ask myself if there is a 
street before my house and if all this geographical 
and topographical phantasmagoria is indeed real ! 
Time and space become mere specks. ... I see myself 
sub specie ceternitatis " (Amiel's Journal Intime). 

And Richard Jefferies : 

" The fact of my own existence as I write, as I exist 
at this second, is so marvellous, so miracle-like, strange 
and supernatural to me, that I unhesitatingly conclude 
I am always on the margin of life illimitable, and that 
there are higher conditions than existence." 

The other members of the fellowship follow suit : to 
Whitman everything was a miracle — a miracle of 
pyrotechnics at which he whistled in amazement like a 
schoolboy. To the studious Sir Thomas Browne, too, 
his thirty years of life was a quiet miracle, " which to 
relate were not an history but a piece of poetry," this 
calm but confident statement drawing from Sir Kenelm 
Digby the facetious comment that thirty years' con- 
tinued miracle should make " a notable romance." 
The liniversalists in their guileless self-revelations and 



122 ON AMIEL AND SOME OTHERS 

their undiscriminating rhapsodies stand like shorn 
and defenceless lambs exposed to the attacks of any 
critic who decides to make a meal of them. Fortun- 
ately, few critics have the heart. 



1916. 



AN AUTUMN STROLL* 

On a recent day in early autumn I stood leaning 
against a tall larch tree, on the edge of a broad plan- 
tation, in a woodland corner of the North of Devon. 
I had been an indoor prisoner for a long, long time, 
and this was a first country walk. What a blessing to 
breathe again the sweet, honey-scented air ! How 
fresh-looking those meadows below, how green the 
trees ! For, autumn notwithstanding, the herbage had 
just reached that stage when it crowds all its many- 
tinted greens and the whole of its remaining vitality 
into one last sunny day; then very quickly follow 
death and decay. 

Even now, a few leaves on that sturdy oak, solitary 
in the field yonder, have turned to golden russet; the 
larches, too, overhead are growing ragged and thin, 
and as the leaves begin to fall a few hardy cones that 
have weathered one winter already peep from their 
summer bowers and prepare once more for the blasts. 
Just in front, over the hedge of thick blackthorn, a 
furze brake — or, as Devonshire folk would say, "vuzz" 
brake— spreads its tangled meshes, and I hear the 

♦ Reprinted from Jhe Countryside. 
123 



124 AN AUTUMN STROLL 

rabbits rustling and scuttling among the bushes as 
though out for a general romp ; up from the valley on 
the left comes the rushing sound of running water, 
and, far ahead, the plain is lost to view in a medley of 
converging hills. Plump on the horizon appear the 
heath-clad downs, their glowing purple clear and 
luscious as the bloom on a peach. 

In the solemnity and silence of the fir-wood I find 
an analogy with the atmosphere of mysterious repose 
in some stately cathedral, in the midst of, yet apart 
from, the vortex of busy life without. Into the dim 
recesses of the fir-wood few sounds of natural life 
make their way — except, perhaps, the call of a crow 
passing over the treetops, or the scream of a startled 
jay; and these are but momentary. Presently I leave 
the still woods to pass through the gap in the hedge, 
and so enter the busy whirl of wild life in the fields. 
It is a long way down to the little ivy-covered bridge 
that spans the river, so I do not hurry. 

Here the delicate eyebright grows so thickly that I 
cannot help but crush it as I walk. Clusters of red 
bartsia and musk mallows crowd out the green of a 
grassy bank. Near a tangle of bramble and sweet 
briar the knapweed rears its head of pink flowerets. 

A few steps further on, with inquisitive intent, I 
overturn a large flat stone (flat stones always harbour 
something interesting). Under this one is a nest of 
black ants. Away they run, carrying their eggs into 



AN AUTUMN STROLL 125 

the heart of the nest ; but — yes, I thought so, right in 
the centre of the principal doorway lolls the ugly, 
repulsive form of a devirs coach-horse, or, as he is 
sometimes called, the Rove beetle. The busy ants find 
him distinctly in the way, and so they energetically 
set to work to shift the obstruction. Two climb on to 
his head and vigorously gnaw the bases of his stout 
antennae, and two others attack the front pair of legs — 
a leg apiece ! Another pinches the soft elongated 
abdomen. The effect on the beetle is ludicrous. He 
snaps his jaws like an angry terrier. Then he frantic- 
ally waves his "yard-arms," and eventually, being 
nipped in many additional places by a reinforcement, 
he cocks his tail over his back and very reluctantly 
(for he has been most comfortably ensconced) beats a 
hasty retreat. This is a great victory for the ants, as 
the devil's coach-horse is a noted warrior in the insect 
world. With renewed energy the ants recommenced 
their labours, and when I re-pass the spot on my way 
home not an ant is to be seen, for the treasures have 
been successfully removed " downstairs." I carefully 
put the stone back in its place. 

Here is the little bridge at last. It is built for the 
cattle to cross upon from one meadow to the other 
when the stream is flooded with winter rains. During 
the summer they scorn the bridge and splash across 
the water. Always a beautiful spot, it is never more 
beautiful than in the early autumn ; moreover, for m^ 



126 AN AUTUMN STROLL 

it has pleasant associations. Up beyond the bridge is 
a waterfall, over which the water gallops from the 
shimmering, silvery weir-pool above into the boulder- 
scattered shallows beneath. Solitude adds to the 
charm. Indeed, a companion's voice could scarce be 
heard amidst the little thunder of these dancing 
" falls." 

That huge holt held an otter once, but whether he 
is there now is doubtful. Anyway, if I would see him, 
I must be up betimes in the morning; I shall not see 
him to-day. A green canopy of hazels and alders 
smiles over all, and through the interstices the sun 
shines, dappling the shady waters with light. It was 
in this very stream, I recall, that I first made acquaint- 
ance with the wild red deer. This is how it was. The 
staghounds had met in the morning up at the village, 
and, according to custom, tufters were taken to a large 
wood some miles distant, which, for some unexplained 
reason, is always a favourite one with the deer. I had 
never yet seen a wild red deer, so I was anxious to 
make the best of my opportunities. No other horse 
but " Shanks' pony " was available, and those " in the 
know " told me that the best thing I could do, in the 
circumstances, was to walk to a certain bridge, as the 
deer, when roused, almost invariably came straight 
down the combe and entered an oak coppice, to the 
left of the high road and adjoining this very bridge. 
I took the advice, and saw something far prettier than 



AN AUTUMN STROLL 127 

the antlered stag, with the eager hounds in his wake. 
I had been waiting patiently for upwards of two hours 
on the bridge and was engrossed in watching a silent 
riverside tragedy — the capture of a water-vole by a 
greedy heron — when, treading softly round the bend 
of the stream, and advancing calmly and quietly and 
in the fearlessness of privacy and innocence, there 
swept across my vision the charmingest, dearest, 
prettiest little calf in creation. He was a tiny fellow 
with brown coat and shapely neck, slender legs, and 
hazel eyes. Upon his lordship's arrival, the heron 
dropped the struggling vole, and he lumbered away 
and pitched on a tall elm; a startled trout swam 
headlong down-stream. The calf, small as he was, 
was making quite a commotion. 

In the helter-skelter in the wood beyond, probably 
he and his mother had been separated, and for the first 
time in his life he had to think for himself, to act on 
his own initiative. The oft-repeated words of the hind 
his mother, that the water carries no scent, seemed 
now very valuable to him. He heard the waters 
calling — 

" I carry no scent, come here, come here, 
For I am the friend of the wild red deer." 

So down towards the bridge he came, where I saw 
him. But he did not catch sight of me for several 
TTiinutes, although he seemed to scent me, He grew 



128 AN AUTUMN STROLL 

fussy and, half-playfully, half-nervously, browsed the 
leaves of a nut-tree. But he did not eat them — he 
disdainfully tossed them over his head, as an old stag 
would a turnip. In jerking his head aloft he suddenly 
saw me ! For a moment he looked spellbound. He 
did not move, nor did I. We looked straight into each 
other's eyes. Then he blinked twice or thrice, and 
slowly came nearer ! Had he passed below the bridge 
I could have touched him with my hand. But I was 
disappointed, for on moving my hand the slightest 
bit downwards the little creature (now standing right 
below me), pricked his ears, jumped lightly on to the 
bank and then trotted across the meadow into a copse, 
where I earnestly hope he remained undisturbed. 

1905. (Published IQ06.) 



TWO SHORT STORIES 



A FOOL AND A MAID ON LUNDY ISLAND* 

It was the seventh day since I came ashore on this 
little granite boss which stands up through the waters 
of the Bristol Channel, and still I could not set to 
work. My cabinet of stoppered glass tubes for the 
collections of the Isopoda and Thysanura which I 
had intended to make were still empty, my cork 
setting-boards for the Lepidoptera still unpacked. 
The prime object of my visit to the island was to 
gather new facts for the padding up of a theory I had 
framed in explanation of the anomalous land fauna of 
this long isolated rock. 

That little problem seemed childish enough beside 
the all-absorbing and incognizable mystery which I 
very soon detected lightly wreathed around its hollow 
fern-lined combes and split pinnacles of granite crag. 

A great enigma had entered like a spirit into the 
soul of the island's beauty and made it dazzling and 
perfectly unintelligible. Its magnetic fascination had 
trapped me within its field and kept me idle through 
the summer days. 

It was the hottest afternoon I had experienced 

* Reprinted from The Academy, 
?3i 



132 A FOOL AND A MAID 

during my stay. A great sheet of liquid blue ran out 
across the channel and in the haze of distance bent 
back, returning again as the blue vault overhead. 
The head of a bull seal rose through the sea-blue, that 
deep mystery of blue, down in the cove 300 feet below. 
I could just make him out with the help of my 
binoculars. He quickly disappeared. 

The sky-blue was so transparent that one might 
reasonably have expected to be able to see through to 
Almighty God Himself sitting on the throne, but it 
was unrelieved by any object save the flecks of a few 
gulls' wings beating up from the sea. 

The island was becalmed. Not a puff of wind 
stirred to swing the sea-pinks or to tap the line against 
the flagstaff on Semaphore Hill. Red Admiral 
butterflies flaunted pink-barred wings to the sun, and 
large green beetles dropped at random into the fern. 
The air was turgid, inspissated almost by the con- 
tinuous heat, yet the calm was not that of inaction 
but the intensification of motion of the " sleeping " 
top. Nature was in dynamic equilibrium. 

The silent brilliance of the scene was menacing. It 
was more terrible than a thunderstorm because more 
unintelligible. 

Flashes of quartz and felspar crystals shot from the 
granite through the eyeball like streaks of pain. 
Somewhere up in the blue, a lark sang on and on 
ceaselessly, as if in a magic trance. It maddened me 



A FOOL AND A MAID 133 

at last, and I longed to rip out its heart and read the 
cypher of that unintelligible song. No other sound 
was audible but the whisper of " mystery, mystery " 
coming up from the sea waves on the beach. 

Such a mystic trinity of sea, sky, and rock would 
have strangled thought even in Spinoza, and excluded 
from its communion Wordsworth's divining soul. A 
great vascular system ramified through Puffin Island 
and distributed to every blade of grass a mystery 
steeped in ichor. I could hear the pulse of its arteries 
in the song of that lark, and seemed to hear the beat 
of its heart coming up through the ground on which 
I stood. 

A large white butterfly nestled in the heather away 
on my right. It was the artist, in her white gown, 
painting the Knight Templar Rock. I wondered 
what impression she could squeeze out of the inscrut- 
able silence of that grey granite stack. She had 
always appeared to be profoundly pleased, I thought, 
with her Lundy work, and certainly none of the 
islanders were troubled with the sensations of mystery 
which fell to my lot. And why should they ? The 
circumstances, after all, were nothing but a fine day 
on a beautiful island, with what the guide-books call 
" rugged scenery of great grandeur." But the mystery 
could not be shaken off. I met with it afresh in the 
next combe, where a boulder-scattered green slope ran 
almost down to the sea. Vast multitudes of uncanny, 



134 A FOOL AND A MAID 

owl-faced puffins had collected there, and stood about 
on the rocks or at the entrance to their nesting 
burrows. Overhead fl.ew a gyrating circle of these 
winged goblins, and the papillotance of the sunlight 
played across the serried ranks of the lesser sprites — 
bluebells, sea pinks, and red robins. Deep, un- 
plumbed silence prevailed, for the puffin has no voice. 
Only occasionally, could be heard the whish of the 
wings of a passing bird. 

The irresistible magnetism of the scene would have 
aroused the most sluggish curiosity and yet defied 
the most intense. I was tired after my long walk in 
the sun, and mentally fatigued as well. I slept at last. 

It was late in the evening when I awoke. For a 
while, the dreams of sleep passed on, uninterrupted, 
into those of my waking hours. A yellow new moon 
overhead was carved into an Egyptian hieroglyph. 
The stars shone out around her; they were the 
polished tips of a thousand spears all pointing down 
at me. A bank of clotted mist caught in the dark 
foliage of a phalanx of Scots firs, whose giant forms 
stood up one behind the other at the top of the slope, 
like a troop of bad angels, and, like the whiteness of 
the bitten lip of hate, the white sea breakers were just 
visible through the thickening fog. The sea itself 
was hidden from view. 

Immense wreaths of mist coiled around the 
columns, pinnacles, and minarets of granite, time- 



A FOOL AND A MAID 135 

sculptured and grey. The mist magnified and trans- 
formed. The island changed into a great temple 
pushing up into the clouds with its superscription 
writ large — 

Deo Ignoto. 

I craved for the intellectual satisfaction of final and 
complete knowledge. I made an effort to reach the 
Deity as I looked out once again with a knife-like 
scrutiny on the sea, and rocks and sky — all those 
material objects which muffled and obscured the 
Real behind them. No reply came, and even as I 
looked, the face of Nature hardened into petrification. 
Its stone bruised the heart. I turned my Gorgon's 
head away towards home, feeling how terrible it was 
to be alive, to be taking part, willy-nilly, in the great 
mystery play, into Death itself. What a grand 
optimism was that which let men eat, drink, and 
carouse. Rather would I have expected them to stand 
at the street corners discussing their common doom or 
to fret their hearts away like beasts tortured in a 
puzzle box. 

I recalled how I had scoffed at the words of my 
friend Kinnaird at lunch that day, when he said, 
looking towards his wife, "The only perfection of 
which man is capable is not knowledge, but love." 
Then, smiling at me, " Give up your search, Para- 
celsus, and take a wife," and I had scoffed again. 
"Whose wife?" said I. 



136 A FOOL AND A MAID 

I was within 50 yards of the Knight Templar Rock 
when I noticed a mysterious whiteness shining 
through the thin mist which capped its top. The few 
scattered rays of the early morning light were directed 
towards that desolate perch. I paused and looked. 
Was it up there on the cold grey stone that I was 
going to find the noumenon, and final rest from the 
hounds of reason and curiosity which had dogged 
my steps ? Or was it a sign, a revelation, implanting 
the germ of a new philosophy of life, which I so badly 
needed ? I soon would know. 

A strong impulse sent me running across the heath 
towards the naked outcrop of granite stone. Sick 
with excitement, I reached the bottom of the stack, 
assured that some sort of consolation awaited me 
above. The rock goes up for 40 feet. I scaled the 
steepest side, forgetting in my haste the steps cut out 
on the other side. I looked over the edge of the top 
cind across at the hgure of a young girl lying out still 
on the flat, lichened surface of the rock. She was 
clothed in a white muslin gown. 

On hands and knees I crept over to her side and lit 
a match. Before the third match in succession 
flickered and went out she opened her eyes and 
caught me watching the beauty of her face. 

I knew then wherein the revelation lay, not in 
knowledge, but in love. 

Even without the large stain of Vandyke brown on 



A FOOL AND A MAID 137 

her small sunburnt hand, I should have recognized 
the person of the artist who, for fear of stepping over 
the cliffs in the fog, had bravely decided to remain on 
the rock until it cleared away. There she fell asleep. 

As we entered the farmstead at the south end of 
the island, day came "like a mighty river flowing 
in." The fog cleared and the air freshened. Already 
I saw a change on the face of Nature. I had cast my 
mental slough. 



[909. 



HOW TOM SNORED ON HIS BRIDAL NIGHT 

They were married at Bristol where Mabel was a 
laundress and Tom the boxing instructor at the camp. 

After the ceremony they went straight home to her 
mother's little cottage in Devon, where a small group 
stood at the door, threw confetti, and gave a short 
self-conscious cheer. A loud self-assertive whoop 
from Bert Vowles was received with a stern glance 
from Tom as he stepped nimbly out of the cab before 
greeting his new relatives. He bestowed a specially 
friendly smile and a brotherly kiss on Lucy, Mabel's 
youngest sister, a pretty girl in delicate health, whose 
tragedy was to carry her head permanently drawn 
down on one side towards the shoulder like a kink in 
the stalk of a flower. 

Now Lucy admired Tom, but simply loathed Bert, 
and Tom's glance of disapproval at the latter was by 
no means lost on her. It was just like Bert to shout 
louder than any one else : she did not know why he 
had turned up at all — after all, he had only just 
begun to walk out with Madge — wretched little tailor 
chap with pimples on his face (Madge gave him 

139 



140 HOW TOM SNORED 

ointment to put on them, and in return he was often 
busy tailoring her skirts). Whereas Tom was a 
soldier with two wound stripes, a boxer, and runner- 
up for the champion featherweight. 

They were quickly hurried in to view the "break- 
fast " spread — " Mum's sponges and jellies " and a 
three-decker cake (the food-controller was easily cir- 
cumvented) laid out in the kitchen on a big trestle 
table by Madge, who had been parlourmaid at the 
Hall and knew how to fold the serviettes in a 
wonderful manner, unknown outside high circles. 
Through the open window came the sound of Madge's 
excited giggle — " Oh, do let go of me, I shall scream." 
On the garden seat Bert was tickling, squeezing, and 
giggling in a gross indulgence in all the delights of 
rural courtship. Lucy glanced in annoyance towards 
Tom who looked back sympathetically. They under- 
stood one another fine she thought — yes, it really was 
a shame that Mum could allow that sort of thing to 
go on. 

After the ceremony of cutting the cake, and when 
Gaffer Laramy's appetite had eased off, ruminating, 
he remarked to the bride : " Well, my dear, I suppose 
you found the ceremony a little awkward, never 
'aving been in a Catholic place of worship before." 
" Oh, I got on alright, Mr. Laramy ; you see I am only 
learning the religion. 'Tiz a difficult religion to learn 
however," replied Mabel with phlegm. " You'll get 



HOW TOM SNORED 141 

into the way of it," said Tom encouragingly. Gaffer 
pursued : " Well, Mrs. Cox, I suppose all your 
daughters be fixed up now, eh ?" 

He had forgotten Lucy, but Lucy did not mind — 
she was used to being forgotten, and thought out 
of the running in everything. No one ever thought of 
her as like other girls, but only as — " poor Lucy." 

Tom looked up brightly and said to Mrs. Cox : 
"Oh, I don't know, there's Lucy, you'll lose her yet." 
Mrs. Cox sighed heavily and whispered to the Best 
Man, a stranger, "Afflicted from birth." "So?" said 
he quietly, " a pretty lass for all that, Mrs. Cox." 

Lucy knew what her mother was saying, she always 
said it, and she always sighed as if it were her own 
affliction much more than Lucy's. With no other 
intention than to appear amiable and knowing Bert 
winked and said : " I rather think Alfred West is 
sweet on Lucy." Lucy flushed, and there was a dead 
silence for a moment or two, even Bert ceasing to 
frolic with Madge's hands under the table in a 
genuine puzzlement at the effect he had produced. 
Alfred West was the village hunchback. 

Presently Tom, indignant : " Why aren't you in 
the army ?" almost as much as to say, " Why aren't 
you dead ?" " They won't have me," Bert replied. 
" I'm not surprised," snapped Lucy. " Tut, tut," 
murmured Gaffer. 

" Do you think you could make a boxer of him. 



142 HOW TOM SNORED 

Tom ?" Lucy inquired. Tom shrugged his shoulders. 
" I expect you'd knock some stuffing out of him," 
pursued Lucy. " Oh, some stuffing would have to be 
knocked into him first," muttered Tom sotto voce. 

Mabel remonstrated : " Oh, Tom." Madge pouted, 
and Mrs. Cox, to clear the air a little, got up and 
asked brightly : " Now, who is going to help me shift 
out the furniture for the dancing ?" 

They danced till after midnight, Mabel and Tom 
leading off and receiving, especially from Gaffer, all 
the admiration they deserved as a handsome young 
couple. 

Then came singing. Gaffer Laramy presented his 
small repertoire, reserved for high days and holidays 
and jollifications at the Green Dragon — "Won't you 
come and veed the vowls ?" 

" Garn ! No wonder Gaffer is always singing that 
toon," cried Bert. " I counted twenty chicken when 
I was down by his fence yesterday — they must cost 
summat in corn." 

The company laughed and cunning Gaffer 
chuckled : " Well, I reckon you'll be glad to sing that 
toon when you're married and got a brood." Loud 
laughter greeted this sally, and Bert had to subside. 

Lucy could not dance because of her " affliction," 
but she sang very well, and so did Tom, and Lucy 
accompanied him. Tom behaved, she thought, in a 
most genteel manner, carefully turning over the 



HOW TOM SNORED 143 

leaves, and Tom, looking down at her delicate hands 
and nimble fingers, thought to himself more than 
once — " What a pearl of a girl ! What a pity. . . ." 

She was a year younger and Mabel three years 
older than he was. 

They so enjoyed their music together that they 
went on long after the appreciation of their audience 
was exhausted and general conversation had been 
resumed. Mabel sat by the piano and fidgetted. Then 
Lucy suddenly got up, walked to the door, called and 
beckoned to Tom, and took him outside into the 
parlour. She had been dying to tell him all the 
evening, and now was the chance. Mysteriously 
drawing from her pocket a little package — a silver 
matchbox, she said : " I wanted to give you a little 
something for yourself." 

Tom was delighted; in high spirits he seized his 
sister-in-law round the waist, and was kissing her on 
the lips, when the kitchen door opened, and Mabel 
appeared. " What are you two doing out here, kissing 
in the moonlight?" Tom sprang from Lucy to his 
bride, exclaiming : " Look, isn't this a lovely present 
from Lucy." " How lovely," Mabel agreed, and then 
added at once : " I'll give you a cigarette-box to 
match it — but I say Tom, come on, they want us to 
do that dance together again." And they went off up 
the passage doing a two-step, what time Lucy walked 
slowly behind. 



144 HOW TOM SNORED 

" I thought the Httle lass had 'urned off with your 
man altogether," said Gaffer on their re-entry. *' I 
dessay she'd like to," Mabel answered, smiling 
proudly. 

Later on, when it was past three o'clock in the 
morning, Lucy found herself sitting beside Mabel. 
" Did Tom really like the matchbox ?" she asked 
eagerly. "Oh, my dear, he's been talking of 
nothing else ever since." There was a flavour of 
sarcasm in the exaggeration, but Lucy did not 
notice it. 

Mrs. Cox brought the festivities to an end by 
producing her famous elder-berry wine, and while 
Gaffer freely toasted bride, bridegroom, and their 
future offspring in little speeches of a vinous streak 
and flecked with harmless Rabelaisian pleasantries, 
the bride herself slipped quietly up to the bridal 
chamber, which Lucy had lavishly decorated with 
primroses and violets. 

Gaffer patted Tom on the shoulder as he thumped 
out to the door with his ash stick : 

"Well, Sonny, I reckon you be eager to climb 
timbern 'eel to the Blanket Vair as the zaying is." 
(Everyone laughed nervously). " Do your dooty " 
(more nervous laughter and Tom thought, "I wish 
the old blighter would buck up and clear out "), " and 
remember Noove Chappel" (no one knew what he 
meant, but everyone laughed to relieve the tension, at 



HOW TOM SNORED 145 

this dramatic juncture). In the room above, Mabel 
awaited her lover. 

Gaffer went stumping off up the road, and then a 
strange thing happened — a portent. Up to then no 
one in the village had ever heard him give utterance 
to anything but the invitation to feed his fowls, but 
now he burst into a new song with the refrain : 

" I don't care 
Whether it's snowing or blowing 
Tm going — 

For I only got married this morning 
And I must be home to- night." 

To the tune of which Epithalamion Tom, without 
saying good-night to anyone, not even to Lucy, slowly 
climbed the stairs, accidentally springing a mouse- 
trap in a corner of the landing as he did so. He 
jumped. Bert, below, sniggered. 

Lucy, not being at all disposed to witness any more 
of Berfs horseplay (he had blacked his face and 
dressed up as a girl, and was trying to detain the 
sleepy company by a continuation of his gambols), 
presently in an abstracted air followed Tom's footsteps 
upstairs and absentmindedly walked straight into the 
room the couple were occupying, where she saw Mabel 
sitting up in bed with her arms around her knees; 
Tom had fastened a bunch of violets (Lucy's violets) 
in her nightie and was sitting on the bed taking off 
his Army boots. 



146 HOW TOM SNORED 

" Oh ! I forgot," said Lucy, retiring in confusion 
just as Mum called up the stairs in horror-stricken 
tones, " Lucy, Lucy, remember you're sleeping in the 
spare room to-night." 

" How stupid of me," she reflected, while undressing 
and getting into bed. But that night her life was 
turning, turning so fast amid a crowd of strange 
emotions she scarcely knew what she did. She was 
barely aware that she had pulled the bed round so 
that the tragic blemish on her neck was turned 
towards the wall away from tlie door, and she was 
certainly unconscious w4iy she had carefully placed a 
bunch of violets in her nightie and was sitting up in 
bed with her arms round her knees, just like Mabel. 
Certainly it was in no spirit of deliberate rivalry. 
She wanted to convince herself and she succeeded. 
. . . Self -confidence was a new and very welcome 
experience to her, thanks to Tom's attentions. But 
why didn't he say good-night? There were such a 
lot of things she wanted to say to him and they 
understood each other fine. . . . She wanted to 
thank him for siding with her against that Bert. She 
did so want to kiss him good-night. Lucy's warm 
heart often tempted her to kiss people if they were 
kind to her, because it was so difficult to express in 
words all she felt. Had he really been talking about 
her matchbox all the evening? Perhaps he really 
meant her to stay awhile just now when he said, " Oh 



HOW TOM SNORED 147 

come in, come in." How stupid she was to come out 
in such a hurry ! 

On the impulse she suddenly thumped on the 
dividing wall between the two rooms and a moment 
later Mabel appeared, candle in hand, and beheld her 
similacrum sitting up in the bed before her. At once 
she was furious. " Whatever is the matter ?" she 
cried. " Are you ill ?" Somehow, in her mental pre- 
occupation with Tom, Lucy had anticipated no one 
but the chivalrous Thomas by her bedside. Confused, 
she mumbled that she only wanted to ask Tom a 
question. " My dear child," said Mabel, " you are 
making yourself quite ridiculous ! You don't think 
Tom cares anything about you. He only pities you. 
For goodness' sake don't be a silly little fool," and she* 
flung out of the room. For ten minutes afterwards, 
Lucy could hear a geyser of chatter from Mabel who 
was one of those girls silent in company but astonish- 
ingly garrulous in a tete-a-tete. Tom's low chuckles 
were Lucy's coup de grace. The storm in her breast 
was so loud she never heard her mother till she was 
standing at the bedside, embrocation bottle in hand, 
and saying : " You shouldn't disturb them, my dear, 
they don't want to be disturbed, call me if you want 
anything." 

Lucy submitted to her mother's ministrations with- 
out protest, hoping thereby she would leave the room 
the sooner. Mrs. Cox bade her good-night and be a 



148 HOW TOM SNORED 

good girl and if she wanted anything to call her. She 
did not notice that Lucy was in tears. That was 
always the case — she never noticed anything — she 
had never noticed that Lucy was now a woman. She 
never noticed this frail bark with hatches open labour- 
ing on towards her predestined storms in those wild 
Biscayan latitudes between the ages of eighteen and 
twenty-five. " Poor Mrs. Cox," as she was known in 
the village on Lucy's account, was a pitiless old 
woman simply from absence of imagination. She 
was cruel because she lacked understanding, for the 
mo^t part her heart was quite discounted by her head. 

That night Lucy's heart knew its own bitterness 
and she swallowed her cupful to the lees. M. Duhamel 
writes that the human being suffers in his flesh 
solitarily. How much more solitary and inaccessible 
is the human being in mental anguish ! How was it 
possible, short of a miracle, for one to be found in that 
Devon village with the imagination capable of even 
distantly approaching Lucy in her pain ? No one had 
ever come near her. She was alone. A black eagle 
had pounced on her when a child and carried her off 
to an inaccessible ledge in the mountains. There she 
remained listening to friends below, faintly murmur- 
ing as they passed on with automatic precision : 
" Poor Lucy." 

No one, she reflected bitterly, took the trouble to 
understand. She was quite unconscious of it, but she 



HOW TOM SNORED 149 

really hated her mother who never seemed to realize 
that Lucy ever wanted anything but the embrocation. 
Tom was the first person she had fancied who per- 
fectly understood her, but now ... ah yes, they had 
all got used to her and her trouble, but she was far 
from getting used to herself. 

The dawn was stealing in through the lattice, but 
still she did not sleep. Down in the " Bottom " there 
was a pond by which she often lingered under the 
firm impression that there on its bottom would be her 
ultimate resting-place. The water was so clear and 
clean and sweet, and blue forget-me-nots grew round 
the edge. She thought about it now. . . . Why n'ot ? 
Nobody would care. . . . On the instant, the long 
period of sad reverie was brought to an end by a 
loud snore, and then another and another. It was 
Tom in the next room. 

Life is a queer mixture — grave and gay, serious and 
ridiculous — all woven together in a piece — so Lucy 
used to reflect when, in later years, she recalled how 
once Tom's chuckles almost drove her to suicide and 
how once Tom's snores saved her from that tragic 
end. But the fact of the matter is, that snoring is 
ridiculous, especially when overheard through the 
walls of a bedroom, and the vision of a lethargic 
sprawling figure with mouth open and dead to the 
world never fails to produce a contemptuous if in- 
dulgent grin. Even Lucy smiled. And her eager 



150 HOW TOM SNORED 

heart felt there must be something a little chilling in 
the complete detachment and indifference of a beloved 
figure unconscious and snoring. It made her question 
whether all folk, married and single alike, are not in 
the last analysis alone — sea-girt isles, often storm- 
swept and inaccessible. 

Anyhow, Tom's snores were prose not poetry ; in her 
mind now, he had doffed his shining armour for a 
nightshirt : she was inclined to think that after all 
there was nothing so very romantic and mysterious 
about married life. For herself, she certainly could 
not sleep in the same room with someone who snored. 
Madge snored, so she had to sleep with her mother. 

It was now a beautifully cool, fresh spring morning, 
and several Great Tits were calling " Beeju, beeju" 
from the apple-tree. Although she had not slept a 
wink all night Lucy jumped out of bed, went down, 
and before getting the breakfast rambled through the 
orchard, yellow with daffodils, down to the stile in 
the meadow and back. Then she took two new-laid 
eggs, toast, and butter on a tray up to Tom and 
Mabel — greeting their sleepy countenances with a 
cheerful " Good-morning, Mr. and Mrs. Stamper. 
Remember Noove Chappel, you know." Mabel was 
not a little puzzled at her happy contented face. 
Lucy surprised herself a little, but the glamour of the 
night being over she felt in her heart no envy of those 
two on that bright spring morning. 



ESSAYS IN NATURAL HISTORY 

" It is holier to examine than believe." — Brehm 



SPALLANZANI* 

Spallanzani's dates (i;29-i;99) form the fons et 
origo of many important departments of biological 
research. The genius of Spallanzani touched and 
adorned so many things that it is impossible to avoid 
coming constantly upon his work. But the remark- 
able personality of the man behind the name will 
possibly come as a surprise to English workers who, 
if tempted for once in a way to make an incursion 
into the field of biography, shall find their curiosity 
in this instance amply justified. 

There is a large Italian literature about him.t Even 
in his own country and among his own friends, he 
always was, and still is, regarded as a prophet and a 
great man, so that his fellow-countrymen have not 
thought it superfluous to study his life and character 
in the minutest details, but in the small compass of 
this article only the bald facts can be given. 

His personality is striking. The Abbe Spallanzani 

* Reprinted from Science Progress. 

t See " Lazzaro Spallanzani," Pavia, 1871 (Gibelli) and 
" L'Abbate Spallanzani a Pavia," Milan, 1901 (Pavesi, Societa 
Italiana di Scienze Naturali e Museo Civico di Stovia Naturale 
di Milano, Vol. VI., Fasc. III). 

153 



154 SPALLANZANI 

was a priest and a savant, although in fact he pos- 
sessed none of the characteristics one is accustomed 
by convention to associate with those two vocations. 
Greedy, ambitious, arrogant, and at times violent, 
Spallanzani was a bull-moose type of man who 
charged through life with his head down. There 
were many obstacles to his success, but he brushed 
them aside; he had many detractors, but he pinned 
them down. To his opponents in biological con- 
troversy, he never expressed any flabby desire to 
agree to differ. They were attacked with acerbity, 
and whether right or wrong he emerged triumphant. 
False modesty was not one of the Abbe's faults. 
When, as a young man conscious of his own genius, 
he ventured upon a criticism of the illustrious Buffon, 
he did so with a sardonic expression of his own 
incompetence. He never showed the smallest inclina- 
tion to mislead his contemporaries into giving him 
less than his deserts. He set out to be second to 
none — not even in salary — and he succeeded and was 
proud of it. 

There is indeed a gamey flavour about Spallanzani, 
and it is easy to understand his popularity among his 
students. They must have found it invariably safe to 
shelter themselves, their hopes, and ambitions within 
the shadow of a personality so mountainous as his. 

Lazzaro Spallanzani was born at Scandiano, in 
Modena, on the loth of January, 1729. His father, an 



SPALLANZANI 155 

advocate, gave him his first lessons, and subsequently 
he passed into the Jesuit College at Reggio, with the 
intention, we are told, of entering that body. But, as 
a matter of fact, he passed into the University of 
Bologna, and thus entered upon the critical phase in 
his intellectual development, for his celebrated cousin, 
Laura Bassi, was Professor of Physics at Bologna, 
and it is believed that her influence was the principal 
factor in determining his taste for natural philosophy. 

By the year 1758 he had become Professor of Logic 
and Geometry in the University of Reggio, and in 
1760 he was translated to Modena to hold the Chair 
of Physics. The youthful Professor had already made 
a reputation when in 1769 he became the first to hold 
the newly-appointed Chair of Natural History in the 
University of Pavia, which, at the instigation of 
Maria Theresa, then ruling over Austrian Lombardy, 
was being re-organized and re-equipped. 

He inaugurated his series of lectures with " an 
elegant Latin discourse" on the controversy between 
the Preformists and the Epigenists. Buffon, whose 
flights of imagination were well calculated to arouse 
antipathy in a hard-headed and prudent investigator 
like Spallanzani, was propagating his doctrine of 
"organic molecules" — a fantastic Buffonesque em- 
broidery of the preformation hypothesis tending 
towards epigenesis. Spallanzani, an orthodox be- 
liever in the preformation faith, mistook it for sheer 



156 SPALLANZANI 

epigenesis {vide " Dissertations relative to the Natural 
History of Animals and Vegetables," Vol. II., p. i6o, 
London, 1784), then accounted a heresy, and, wielding 
that damaging epithet " imaginative," made battery 
and assault on the handsome, speculative Frenchman. 

"Plus ga change, plus c'est la meme chose." The 
controversy in a more developed form continues still, 
and it looked at one time, before Roux's initial experi- 
ments with the frog's egg were carried further, as if 
the philosophic attitude of Spallanzani and his sup- 
porters might prove to be sound. 

More than one of Buffon's claims were attacked 
with spirit by Spallanzani, who placed over against 
Buffon's interesting speculations his own still more 
interesting facts obtained under conditions of rigid 
experiment — notably his work with hermetically 
sealed flasks in which he showed no life developed if 
they were subjected to powerful heat. Spallanzani's 
methods were an enormous advance upon those pre- 
viously used, although they by no means set the 
matter at rest. The old bone of Spontaneous Genera- 
tion has since been dug up many times and chewed. 
And it is not buried yet.* 

Of course, Spallanzani made mistakes — indeed to 
his credit it might be said if the ancient adage be 
true. In those days it used to be thought by some 

* I am referring to the experiments of the late Dr. H. 
Charlton Bastian. 



SPALLANZANI 15; 

that fecundation was effected by some sort of aura 
or gas given off by the seed of the male. Spallanzani 
succeeded in showing that the semen itself is the 
responsible agent, though he aggressively claimed to 
have fertilized frogs' eggs with seminal fluid devoid 
of spermatozoa, in contravention of the theory of 
Leeuwenhoek who was advocating the " spermatic 
vermicelli " as the " immediate authors of generation." 
Spallanzani thought he had " irrefragably proved " 
the falsity of this doctrine. Leeuwenhoek, on the 
other hand, denied the ovum any important part in 
the formation of the embryo, regarding it apparently 
as the nidus in which the spermatozoon developed. 
It is permissible to feel a certain amount of sardonic 
satisfaction at the ex cathedra pronouncements the 
Professor gave upon questions in which Time, the 
Enemy, has found him out. Spallanzani's loyalty to 
his own observations made him over confident, too 
cocksure. 

An incident in connection with his translation of 
Bonnet's "The Contemplation of Nature" is worth 
recording for the illumination it sheds upon his point 
of view in biology and in University education. 
Each Professor was required to select a book for the 
use of the students, and Spallanzani's choice fell 
naturally on his translation of Bonnet. But this 
selection on being submitted did not meet with 
approval in Vienna, where ideas of University 



158 SPALLANZANI 

instruction in biology were diametrically opposed to 
those now in vogue. That is to say, great importance 
was attached to systematic work to the exclusion of a 
more philosophical treatment of the subject. The 
Professor of Natural History in Vienna, a man un- 
known to fame and the author of a single modest 
treatise, entitled " Additamenta quaedam ad Entomo- 
logiam," sat in judgment upon the exasperated 
Spallanzani, and reported that, while he admired the 
philosophic character of Spallanzani's selection, he did 
not believe Bonnet's book sufficient to give the neces- 
sary instruction in nomenclature which was the 
universal language used by naturalists of many coun- 
tries to make themselves and their works understood. 
Spallanzani's philosophic temper made him already 
impatient with the systematists at whom he flung the 
gibe of " nomenclature naturalists " ; his contumely 
was prodigiously increased by this obscure Viennese 
Professor's criticisms. 

On being requested, Spallanzani wrote out a 
reasoned programme of the lectures he intended to 
give on Natural History. This programme amounted 
really to a defence of his point of view in Natural 
History, but the higher authorities, in spite of all, 
were adamant, and Spallanzani was forced to come 
to terms on the subject of nomenclature instruction 
with the bribe of a promised increase of salary — 
always an irresistible lure to the Professor. 



SPALLANZANI 159 

But Spallanzani was by nature an intransigeant. 
And it is hardly probable that he would succumb on 
a principle of such vital importance to his biological 
teaching. In fact, there is evidence to show that, as 
in the early days of his Professorship, he continued to 
demonstrate respiration in molluscs, fecundation in 
Amphibia, and other unorthodox phenomena. 

To the efficiency of his lectures all his biographers 
bear witness. Senebier wrote : " Une eloquence 
simple et vive animait ses discours; la purete et 
Telegance de son elocution seduisaient ceux qui 
I'entendaient." He possessed the teacher's gift of 
inspiring with enthusiasm both students and the men 
of science who came to hear him from every part of 
Europe. The tributes of liis European contempor- 
aries were generous without reserve. Bonnet said 
that he had discovered more truths in five or six 
years than all the Academies in half a century, while 
" the dying hand of Haller consigned to him the 
defence of Truth and Nature." 

During the first part of his residence in Pavia, he 
lodged in an ex-convent with Professor Scopoli, and 
although when and where is not known, he must have 
already taken Holy Orders, as he was accustomed to 
increase his income by conducting Mass in a Church 
close at hand. On quitting these lodgings he engaged 
some rooms in a house in the attic of which his famous 
experiments on bats were carried out. The house has 



i6o SPALLANZANI 

been identified and in the attic some interesting relics 
were discovered in the strings and dried up pipis- 
trelles used by him in these investigations. He 
blinded the animals, sometimes by burning the eyes 
with a red hot wire, and sometimes by removing the 
organs altogether, and even filling up the orbital 
cavity with wax. Notwithstanding these mutilations, 
the little creatures were able to fly as well as before, 
avoiding the walls, and the strings suspended in the 
path of their flight. These and other experiments 
led him to the conclusion that bats find their way in 
the dark by means of some special sense situated in 
an unknown organ in the head. It is now generally 
accepted that this astonishing faculty in bats of 
directing their flight is due to an exceptional develop- 
ment of the sense of touch, especially in the wing 
membranes. 

Before finding fault with the brutality of Spallan- 
zani as an experimenter, it is just to remember that 
his passionate curiosity led him to turn his ruthless 
hand even against himself. For in his " Studies in 
Digestion"* he describes how he swallowed bone, 
cartilage, and tendon, concealed in perforated wooden 
tubes, to be subsequently vomited, and how, in order 
to obtain gastric juice for the purposes of artificial 
digestion, he caused himself to vomit on an empty 

* Proving the fact of digestion by solution as against the 
theory of trituration. 



SPALLANZANI i6i 

stomach, by tickling the fauces. This knowledge 
ought to soften the heart of the most fanatical 
zoophilist towards the Abbe. 

In August, 1779, we find him in Switzerland on a 
visit to his friend Bonnet at the latter's " delightful 
villa" at Genthod. Abraham Trembley was also 
present, and one likes to think of these three, with 
heads bent and hands folde'd behind the back, walk- 
ing and talking together, each of them engaged upon 
researches of great moment in biology — Bonnet 
perhaps on his studies of asexual propagation in 
aphides, Trembley on regeneration in hydra the 
fresh-water polyp, and Spallanzani occupied just 
then in fertilization in toads. In Bonnet's presence 
he cut off the hind legs of a male toad during its 
embrace of the female without effecting a separation. 
The female, he points out, may begin to discharge 
eggs later, and the male with his blood flowing all the 
time continues to impregnate them with his semen. 
In reply to a question, "he did not hesitate to say 
that this persistence was less the effect of obtuseness 
of feeling than vehemence of passion." In these days 
of comparative psychology, the idea of a vehemently 
passionate toad raises a smile. 

The Abbe was an enthusiastic traveller, and his 
expeditions to the Milanese Mountains, to Marseilles, 
Sicily, and his visits to Vesuvius and the Lipari Isles, 
brought in a rich harvest of scientific results. More 



i62 SPALLANZANI 

over, Spallanzani by no means confined his attention 
to biology. He studied natural history in the 
broadest meaning of the term. He helped to lay the 
foundations of vulcanology and meteorology, he 
discovered the true explanation of "Ducks and 
Drakes " on the surface of water (formerly attributed 
to "elasticity" of the water), he experimented with 
the water divining rod, and by the aid of Pennet's 
instrument, called "the Minerographico," he and 
Pennet claimed to have revealed subterranean cur- 
rents of water in the Courtyard of the University. 

In 1784 Spallanzani was projecting his great 
journey to Constantinople, and entered into a corres- 
pondence concerning it with his Excellency Count 
Formian, the Austrian Minister Plenipotentiary at 
the Court of Milan. The Professor was a pastmaster 
in the gentle art of pulling strings, and he had, 
hitherto, been egregiously successful, not only in 
obtaining permission to undertake expeditions, but 
also in obtaining funds for them and in increasing his 
stipend. 

Whether or not the University was at length begin- 
ning to kick against the pricks is not evident, but his 
proposal hung fire, and the arrangements were being 
protracted. 

It was at this juncture towards the end of the year 
that Spallanzani engineered a piece of admirable bluff 
:, as he himself called it, a "giro politico" — by 



SPALLANZANI 163 

asking to be relieved of his post — with the excuse that 
the air in Pavia was unsuitable to his health. Vienna 
straightway, in order " to preserve for the University 
a celebrated person," and in order not to prejudice 
the University in public opinion, promised him hand- 
some compensation in the way of salary if he remained, 
and also gave him permission to go to Constantinople. 
And so, " the fogs cleared, the humidity disappeared, 
and every ill was cured, even the gout," remarks a 
commentator, slyly. 

Spallanzani stayed nearly a year in Turkey, made 
many valuable observations, was received by the 
Sultan, and, on his way home overland, stopped in 
Vienna, to be presented by Joseph 11. with a gold 
medal. The return home was a triumphal progress, 
for on reaching Pavia he was met and acclaimed out- 
side the city gates by numbers of his students and 
escorted by them through the streets. 

It is a well-known fact that the Museum at Pavia 
was founded by Spallanzani. As he himself claimed, 
it had been born under his hands, it had grown under 
his direction, and owed its prosperity to his corres- 
pondence, activity, and travels. Now during Spallan- 
zani's absence in Turkey, Canon Volta, acting as 
Curator of the Museum, made the discovery that 
several objects, though mentioned in the catalogue, 
were missing from the Museum. Volta, alas ! was 
among the few who knew that at Scandiano the 



i64 SPALLANZANI 

Professor owned a private museum. So, pretending 
to set out on an excursion to Tuscany, Volta went to 
Scandiano, and, under a false name, asked to see the 
Spallanzani Museum. On coming out, he went 
straight to an inn and made a note of all he had seen. 
He next wrote to Counsellor don Luigi Lambertenghi 
in Milan, informing him that the numerous objects 
missing from the Museum at Pavia were to be found 
in Spallanzani's Museum in Scandiano, and that 
some of the objects were still marked with their 
original numbers, the jars for the most part having 
the red labels of the jars at Pavia. He requested the 
Counsellor to see that the Government verified his 
assertions. He also gave information to the Supreme 
Ecclesiastical Commission and the Commission of 
Studies, and in Pavia he talked frequently of 
" Spallanzani's thefts," so that the scandal soon came 
to be divulged. 

Professors Scopoli, Scarpa, and Fontana were also 
drawn into the conspiracy, which went to the in- 
credible length of sending to persons in authority, to 
Spallanzani's friend Bonnet, to Tissot and others, to 
the heads of the Italian Universities, and generally 
of distributing throughout the Continent a circular 
informing the world at large of the "unexpected," 
" ignominious," " atrocious " crime of their famous 
colleague. 

The motive actuating these men was said to be 



SPALLANZANI 165 

envy of Spallanzani's eminence as a man of science, 
intensified by their fear of showing it on account of 
his influence at Court. Probably, Spallanzani's own 
intolerant attitude towards his intellectual inferiors 
was scarcely likely to adjust matters. "What 
wonder," he exclaims, speaking of Pavia, " that in 
districts so low, so foggy, so marshy, talents are so 
rare." 

Confronted with a charge of theft of which he was 
early advised, Spallanzani hurried home from Vienna. 
By a special decree of the 14th of September, 1786, 
the Government of Lombardy was ordered to inter- 
vene. The latter sent secretly to Scandiano, where it 
was reported that, though certain objects missing 
from the Museum at Pavia were observed, there was 
no indication to show that they belonged to the 
Museum at Pavia. Under the Presidency of Wilseck, 
Minister Plenipotentiary, an enquiry was opened at 
the Royal Palace of Milan, where Spallanzani's reply 
to the charge succeeded conspicuously. The missing 
birds were badly prepared, had lost their feathers, and 
were eventually thrown away. The armadillo, the 
snakes, the seal, the hammer-headed shark, and the 
sword-fish, had been given away in exchange. Other 
things had been used in experiments, and finally the 
rare Conus — " Cono ammirale " — turned up again in 
the Museum, and had never really been lost. 

The Abb6 preferred a counter-charge against Volta 



i66 SPALLANZANI 

of breaking up agates and precious stones and distri- 
buting tlie pieces among his friends. He also showed 
tliat the Curator often left things out on the table of 
the Museum when students and workmen were free to 
come in and out 

A report of these lamentable proceedings was for- 
warded to \'ienna, with a letter from the President to 
the Imperial Chancellor Kaunitz, in which insistence 
was placed on putting an end to intrigues among the 
Professors, as it created a spirit of faction among 
them, and brought discord even among the students. 

As a result of the inquiry, Spallanzani was declared 
innocent. Canon Volta was deprived of his office as 
Curator of the Museum, and sent away from Pavia, 
while Professors Fontana, Scarpa, and Scopoli were 
censored " for the grave prejudice to the reputation of 
Professor Spallanzani by having imputed to him with- 
out proof " so grave a charge as theft 

Spallanzani was delighted. He sent a warm letter 
of gratitude to Wilseck, his " great protector and 
great Maecenas," and distributed to all the European 
centres of learning a circular in reply to the one sent 
by the conspirators showing how his character had 
been cleared. 

In spite of the issue of a royal decree imposing 
silence upon those concerned in the scandal, the 
Reverend Abbe was unable to restrain himself from 
reviling his calumniators with vituperation of a kind 



SPALLANZANI 167 

that betrayed at least a clumsy wit. Volta was " a 
bladder, full of wind, an object of abomination and 
horror." Scarpa was " a cabalist, one of the most 
inferior of scholars, a perfect plagiarist." Scopoli was 
a "Physis intestinalis," this being a name published 
by Scopoli for a portion of probably a bird's trachea 
in mistake for an intestinal worm which is given all 
the usual honours of a figure and — description in 
Scopoli's book, " Deliciae Florae et Faunae Insubricae 
seu Novae aut minus cognitae species Plantarum et 
Animalium quas in Insubrica Austriaca."* In addi- 
tion to these sledge-hammer blows he also dealt out 
the stiletto thrusts of anonymous communications to 
the newspapers, which have been dealt with by 
Professor Pavesi in " II Crimine Scientifico di 
Spallanzani guidicato " 'Milan, 1899). 

Some doubts, after all, of Spallanzani's integrity in 
the affair have been expressed. These probably 
originated in the fact that Professor was reported 
to have subsequently suppressed a part of his first 
memorial of defence in which he confessed that at 
Scandiano he kept some of the objects belonging to 
the Museum at Pavia, but only with the idea of study- 
ing them and returning them afterwards to Pavia. 
His natural astuteness helped him to foresee the 
danger of such a confession at such a crisis. 

Although this was not the only battle the Abbe 
* I., 1786, p. 46. 



i68 SPAlLANZANI 

fought with his aggressors, no one ousted him from his 
position or deprived him of his reputation. He con- 
tinued to enjoy his fame, and received many signal 
honours. He was Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy 
several times, and in 1778 the students by a majority 
of votes elected him to the Rectorship. At the 
Museum, he received many distinguished visitors, 
including the Emperor Joseph II. It is amusing to 
read that to the " gentili Signore " he was always 
happy to show the Museum — " provided they were 
beautiful and intelligent." Even this granite character, 
perhaps, had its softer side. 

Although for diplomatic reasons, Spallanzani used 
often to complain that he was not well in Pavia, he 
really enjoyed a florid state of good health; and the 
day before he was attacked by the apoplexy which 
ended in his death he was pursuing with the most 
youthful ardour his experiments in respiration, the 
results of which were published posthumously. Three 
days after his seizure he had recovered sufficiently to 
be able to recite verses from Homer, Tasso, and 
Vergil. But " Canto di cigno," as Professor Pavesi 
says — a droll metaphor having regard to Spallanzani's 
raptorial countenance, particularly as it must have 
looked peering above the bedclothes ! — " Canto di 
cigno," for at 2.30 a.m. on the nth of February, 1799, 
after having received the Papal Benediction, he fell 
back and expired suddenly. 



SPALLANZANI 169 

At the post-mortem, his heart was taken out and 
deposited by his brother Nicolo in the Church at 
Scandiano. The bladder and urethra being of patho- 
logical interest are still preserved in Pavia — mortal 
relics as notorious as Mr. Babbage's brain or Lord 
Darnley's left femur in the Museum of the Royal 
. College of Surgeons. 

Spallanzani's reputation beyond any doubt has 
declined from the meridian height it occupied during 
his lifetime. His genius of character and his attain- 
ments were evidently a potent influence among his 
contemporaries, and the nature of some of his experi- 
ments in those dark days were well calculated to 
excite the wonder and admiration of the crowd. It 
used to be said that fecundation was among the 
mysteries of Nature and, like many of her operations, 
an object of admiration rather than of inquiry. But 
the Reverend Professor, unwilling to cast too much 
responsibility on the Divine Power, however agree- 
able that might be to the idleness of man, set to work 
and succeeded in artificially fertilizing a bitch spaniel 
with the spontaneous emissions of a dog injected by a 
syringe. Sixty-two days afterwards three lively 
whelps were born. " I can truly say," he remarks, 
" that I never received greater pleasure upon any 
occasion since I cultivated natural philosophy." 

His work in pond life and protozoa — " myriads of 
which peopled a single drop" — and his observations 



i;o SPALLANZANI 

on Rotifers, " which came to life again " after desicca- 
tion, lent colour to the hyperbolic expression of 
admiration with which a poet suggested that he had 
divine power. 

I trust it is no very cynical asperity to say that 
there was nothing divine at all about the Reverend 
Abbe. Spallanzani was not an angel — yet he was 
something more than a great biologist — he was a 
great man. A study of the extensive biographical 
literature which has grown up around him will give 
the curious reader some idea of his masterful person- 
ality and of the way in which it gripped the scientific 
world in which he lived. 



1915- 



COLONEL MONTAGU* 

Colonel George Montagu (1755-18 15) is not a 
star of great magnitude in the firmament of illustrious 
dead naturalists. I cannot even claim for him that, 
like Patrick Mathew, he anticipated Darwin, or that, 
like Gilbert White, he wrote a book which everybody 
reads. Yet English field-naturalists have always been 
ready to give him his due as one of the earliest 
observers to describe with accuracy and scientific 
precision the many singular and interesting animals 
inhabiting our shores and countryside. Professor 
Edward Forbes wrote of him : 

" Montagu's eminence as a naturalist depended upon his 
acute powers of observation and the perspicuous manner in 
which he regarded the facts which came under his notice . . . 
I have had occasion chiefly to test the observation of Montagu 
in cases where marine animals were concerned and have 
been astonished at the extent, variety and minuteness of his 
researches. He laboured at a time when there were few 
people who took an interest in marine zoology . . . but Mon- 
tagu did not shrink from his work because he met few com 
panions or found little sympathy. He steadily pursued his 

* Reprinted from Proceedings of the Linnean Society of 
London. 

171 



i;2 COLONEL MONTAGU 

chosen task and laid the foundation of that thorough investiga- 
tion of the Natural History of the British seas which now 
forms so distinctive and appropriate a feature of the science of 
our country." 

The older English naturalists — Yarrel, Rennie, 
Fleming, Selby, Day — all bear testimony to the value 
of Montagu's work. 

It may be surmised that we are about to deal with 
a very dull fellow indeed. Certainly it may prove 
difficult to stimulate general interest in the secluded 
life of a simple-minded country gentleman who spent 
his days in catching worms and starfish. Moreover, 
Montagu's is not a personality requiring subtle 
psychological analysis. He had no " temperament " 
and no " mission." He started no movement and was 
the centre of no new "culture." Neither the Pre- 
Raphaelites nor the Transcendentalists will be called 
into account. Let the dead bury the dead. Montagu 
was " un coeur simple," and those happily unsophisti- 
cated few who still can pursue with delight the 
fortunes of Dr. Primrose and his spouse will not be 
slow in discovering in the chequered career and naive 
personality of this warrior-naturalist the same charm 
and the same idyllic quality which distinguish " The 
Vicar of Wakefield." 

There is no gainsaying Montagu's enthusiasm for 
zoology. In 1789 he wrote to Gilbert White that were 
he not bound by conjugal attachment he would have 



COLONEL MONTAGU 173 

liked to ride his hobby into distant parts. Lady 
Holland, the famous grande dame, records meeting 
him one day at dinner, when the Colonel " launched 
forth on the topics he is au fait of and during a three 
hours' assemblage of people at and after dinner, he 
gave the natural history of every bird that (lies and 
every fish that swims." 

To trace the genesis of his love of natural history, 
which in those days must have distinguished him as a 
very eccentric person, it is necessary to go back to his 
early youth, when at the age of nineteen he fought in 
the War of the American Colonies as an officer in the 
15th Regiment of Foot. In America he first began to 
shoot and collect birds, a few of which he prepared 
with his own hands, though with no further intention 
than that of presenting them to his Lucasta on return- 
ing from the wars. 

Montagu had already, at the age of eighteen, 
married Anne, the eldest daughter of William 
Courtenay and Lady Jane Courtenay, sister of the 
Earl of Bute, who was Prime Minister to George IIL 
Montagu himself was a man of some quality, his 
mother being the granddaughter of Sir Charles 
Hedges, Queen Anne's Secretary; and his father, 
James Montagu, being descended from James 
Montagu, who was the third son of Sir Henry 
Montagu, first Earl of Manchester. 

Montagu's marriage turned out unhappily. Dates 



i;4 COLONEL MONTAGU 

and details are not available, but it is perhaps 
sufficient to say that he became eventually separated 
from his wife, and in 1799 was living with another 
lady at Kingsbridge in South Devon, where most of 
his best work in marine zoology was carried on. 

Lady Holland, after remarking upon his reputed 
ill-temper and the separation from his wife, adds 
sardonically that he "... might inherit an estate 
from his brother if he would be united to her, but the 
condition is too hard and he renounces the possession 
of a benefit so encumbered." His eldest brother 
James, dying childless, left the family estates at 
Lackham in Wiltshire to the Colonel's eldest son, the 
Colonel himself receiving only a rent charge of i^8oo 
a year. A lawsuit followed, and father and son were 
arraigned against each other. The litigation was 
prolonged, and this, coupled with the son's extrava- 
gance, ultimately deprived the family of their estate. 
Colonel Montagu was forced to endure the mortifica- 
tion of seeing all the fine old timber on the estate cut 
down and sold, and the valuable library and collection 
of relics and curiosities at Lackham House sold and 
disboursed under a decree of the court. 

In later years, the loss of his three lusty soldier sons, 
John, James, and Frederick, brought further sorrow 
into the old gentleman's life, and in the Parish Church 
at Lacock may be read the touching memorial he 
erected to the memory of Frederickj his favourite, who 



COLONEL MONTAGU 175 

fell pierced through the heart by a musket ball, while 
leading his men to the charge at the Battle of Albuera 
in 1811. 

In spite of Lady Holland's gossiping references to 
a threatened court-martial, there is every reason to 
believe that Montagu himself was a very gallant 
soldier who lived up to the best traditions of English 
honour. His book, " The Sportsman's Directory," 
contains some very curious passages of instruction in 
the art of fighting a duel. 

His house at Kingsbridge was full of curiosities and 
trophies, and "there were live birds all over the 
grounds," and ducks, gulls, and all sorts of swimming- 
birds on the pond. This recalls Walton Hall, the 
residence of Charles Waterton, the "mad EngHsh- 
man," famous as a naturalist and as the author of the 
"Wanderings in South America." 

Life in the little town in Devonshire must have 
flowed very quietly. Although of ancient and honour- 
able descent, Montagu founded his claims to respect 
upon individual merit rather than upon noble ancestry. 
He disliked pomp and ceremony of all kinds, and 
found his true measure beating through the brush- 
wood to identify the song of the wood-wren, or 
digging up worms from the mud in the estuary : a 
life of seclusion broken occasionally by the "stagger- 
ing" discovery of some new kind of beast or by the 
presentation of his memoirs to the Linnean Society, 



i;6 COLONEL MONTAGU 

His mistress, Eliza Dorville, seems to have proved 
herself a valuable helpmate to the naturalist, for many 
of the drawings of the animals he studied bear her 
initials. 

Montagu died of lockjaw in 1815 after treading on 
a rusty nail during the course of some repairs to the 
house, when a lot of old timber was lying about. His 
authoritative biographer, William Cunnington, in his 
short memoir in the Wiltshire Magazine, tells us that 
in his last illness, Montagu bore his sufferings with 
the equanimity of a philosopher and the fortitude and 
resignation of a true Christian. An old friend, the 
Rev. K, Vaughan, of Modbury, was at his bedside 
when he died. On being asked where he would like 
to be buried, the Colonel replied calmly, " Where the 
tree falls, there let it lie " ; which seems to show that he 
met even the Last Enemy with a stout heart. 

Many years ago when Kingsbridge Church was 
being restored, the vaults in the aisles were opened 
and the lead stolen from the coffins. Montagu's coffin 
was the most massive of all, but the thieves succeeded 
in ripping off the lead, the remains of the coffin and 
the naturalist's bones being pitched back into the 
vault. 

Montagu's fame as a naturalist rests mainly on his 
Ornithological Dictionary, which, at the time of its 
publication in 1802, formed an excellent compendium 
of information on the structure, life-history, and habits 



COLONEL MONTAGU i;; 

of our British birds. This curious old book, arranged 
in alphabetical order, established Montagu's reputa- 
tion. Even a superficial survey will convince the 
student of its worth. It was Montagu who first made 
known to science the beautiful Roseate Tern, which he 
named Sterna Dougalli in honour of Dr. M'Dougall, 
who sent him specimens from the Cumbraes m the 
Firth of Clyde. One of these historic specimens is 
still preserved in the Natural History Museum at 
South Kensington. 

By paying strict attention to the changes of 
plumage incidental to age, sex, and season, Montagu 
achieved a great deal of useful work, and, among 
other things, proved that the " Greenwich Sandpiper " 
was only one of the many varieties of the Ruff; that 
the "Ash-coloured Sandpiper" is really the Knot. 
Similarly, he disposed of the "Winter Gull" which 
was only Larus canuSy and corrected the mistake of 
" that celebrated author, Mr. Pennant," concerning the 
" Brown Owl," which was merely a variety of the 
Tawny species {Syrnium aluco). Montagu gave us 
the first adequate account of the natural history of the 
Dartford Warbler, and those who have learnt to 
recognize and admire the beautiful Cirl Bunting may 
like to know that Colonel Montagu first discovered 
the bird in this country. With the characteristic 
caution and critical discernment of the scientific man, 
Montagu hesitated to embrace Gilbert White's heresy 



i;8 COLONEL MONTAGU 

of the hibernation of swallows, believing the majority 
to migrate while a few only were detained by accident 
and, becoming torpid, perished before tlie return of 
warmer weather. It is usually stated that Mrs. 
Blackburn (Naittre, i8;2, Vol. V., p. 383) Erst con- 
firmed Jenner's controverted statements about the 
cuckoo's ejection of the young of the foster parent. 
But Montagu's remarks on this subject in the Dic- 
tionary in 1S02 support and confirm Jenner's remark- 
able discovery, and there is no reason to disbelieve 
the Colonel's word that his own observations were 
actually made before those of Jenner. 

We learn from Cunnington that Montagu always 
kept his word, was always punctual, precise in his 
methods of work, punctilious over questions of fact, 
and in industr}' indefatigable. These jots and tittles 
of evidence point straight to the conclusion that th« 
Father of English Ornithology was a good type of 
the average man of science — accurate, conscientious, 
thick-fingered, laborious, practical, excellent. Perhaps 
he was also pig-headed, irascible, and proud. Any- 
way, if the reader be tempted to dip into the Ornitho- 
logical Dictionary — and I heartily recommend the 
experiment — he will find therein revealed another 
characteristic which easily falls into line with the rest 
and completes the picture for us : the Colonel could 
not spell, and he struggled with the English Syntax 
like a lion in a net ! The critics — oh ! serious critics ! 



COLONEL MONTAGU 179 

— taxed the old gentleman with writing " ossious," 
" curviture," " delatable," and for such formidable 
English as, " With all these reflections formed on the 
known laws of Nature, evinced by daily experience, 
we can have no more doubt of the identity of these 
two shrikes as distinct species than we have that they 
are different from the Cmereous Shrike." 

Using the butt end of his pen, he repulsed the 
attack of his critics by likening them to " assassins 
with hands continually imbued with blood." Critics 
and assassins followed " congenial trades," for " each 
stabs in the dark and are too frequently actuated by 
similar motives." 

Proficient in the use of the gun, pistol, and scalpel, 
the gallant Colonel probably found the pen fiddling 
work, and after all, love, marriage, and war at the age 
of nineteen scarcely form the right psychological 
climate for acquiring a pure English style. 

There is no space to speak fully of Montagu's inter- 
esting discoveries in marine zoology. He discovered 
several new fishes, and added the beautiful Butterfly 
Blenny to the British list. In the " Testacea Bri- 
tannica " 470 molluscs are enumerated, upwards of a 
hundred of which had not been described before, or 
else were then for the first time ascertained to be 
British. 

Quite a tour de force in its way was his " Spongia 
Britannica," for in Montagu's time it was no easy 



i8o COLONEL MONTAGU 

matter to write a book on British sponges, as next to 
nothing was known of their structure, and systematic 
writers therefore had to rely upon inadequate and 
superficial characters for differentiating species. 
Montagu himself speaks of it as an "occult science," 
and it is very much to his credit that succeeding 
authors have been unanimous in regarding his sponge 
work as " good as far as it goes." 

It is natural of course to compare him with his 
correspondent and more famous contemporary, Gilbert 
White, the association being more by contrast than 
similarity. Both were field-naturalists who drew " the 
hidden treasures from their native sites." But 
Montagu was an efficient zoologist who mentally 
photographed and faithfully recorded phenomena in 
a series of memoirs to learned Societies. White 
strolled in his garden or on Selborne Hanger, and 
then wrote a letter telling us what he had observed. 
Moreover, White was a scholar and wrote tolerable 
verses. There is a delightful personal flavour in his 
book, and the " Natural History of Selborne " is as 
fresh to-day as if the ink were still wet on the page. 
The hard, impersonal verities, which Montagu 
recorded with a graceless pen, have long since passed 
into the body of our general information, and there 
remains no particular cause, unless it be curiosity, to 
seek out the archives in which they are entombed, and 
no bounden duty, unless it be gratitude, to perpetuate 



COLONEL MONTAGU i8i 

the memory of the man to whom, whether naturalists 
know it or not, they are indebted for a large propor- 
tion of our seaside natural history and the natural 
history of our British birds. 



1915- 



ROUSSEAU AS BOTANIST* 

In his early days, Jean Jacques Rousseau sampled 
most of the good things in the intellectual larder, and 
more than once — like a mischievous boy — brought the 
jam-pot down on his head. He read anatomy until he 
fancied he had " a polypus at the heart." A mixture 
of " quicklime, orpiment, and water " exploded in his 
face, and so put a short term to his researches in 
experimental physics. In astronomy and geology his 
studies were equally short, and we may be sure that 
he was the least likely person to resume his struggles 
with the science of numbers at the bidding of that 
facetious lady of Venice, who, it will be remembered, 
made him a present of this sound advice : " Lascia le 
donne e studia le matematiche." 

At the time when Rousseau was one of the remark- 
able menage at Les Charmettes, the study of botany, 
one day to become his master passion, made no appeal 
to him. Nay, he despised it, considering botany as a 
subject fit merely for an apothecary, and Rousseau's 
opinion of apothecaries and physicians was at no 

* Reprinted from The Journal of Botany. 
183 



1 84 ROUSSEAU AS BOTANIST 

time very high. Madam de Warens herself was a 
herbahst rather than a botanist, and that silent 
devotee, Claude Anet, was originally taken into her 
service because he was a herbalist and because 
Madam thought it convenient to have among her 
domestics someone with a knowledge of drugs. 

Botany therefore became confounded in Rousseau's 
mind with anatomy and medicine, and served only to 
afford him frequent opportunities for pleasantries at 
Madam de Warens' expense, in this way earning for 
himself a friendly box on the ears. 

But even in those days of high contemptuous youth, 
Rousseau was sometimes persuaded, at the beck of 
Madam de Warens, to bend his head over a plant, 
while " Mama " pointed out to him a thousand natural 
beauties which greatly amused him and should have 
made him a botanist.* "But the time was not yet, and 
my attention was arrested by too many other studies " 
— by music in particular. 

It was more than twenty years later that Rousseau's 
slumbering interest in botany burst into the flame of 

* During a walk at Cressier in 1764 Rousseau noticed a 
Periwinkle growing among some undergrowth and was im- 
mediately transported in memory back to his old friend 
Madam de Warens, and to the incident when she drew his 
attention to a specimen of the plant some thirty years before 
From this circumstance the Periwinkle, in France, came to be 
the emblem of the pleasures of memory and sincere friend- 
ship. 



ROUSSEAU AS BOTANIST 185 

real passion. By this time he was a refugee from France 
and from Geneva, and had settled down at length 
in Motiers, one of the villages standing in the Val de 
Travers, a valley between the gorges of the Jura and 
the Lake of Neuchatel Here, big with desire for " a 
knowledge of every known plant on the globe," he 
began with an attempt to commit to memory the 
whole of the "Regnum Vegetabile" of Murray ! Little 
wonder that, clad in his Armenian costume and 
breathing from mouth and nostrils (one almost 
believes) the fires of his fanatical zeal for plants, this 
remarkable botanist — surely the most remarkable in 
the history of the science ! — was generally held by the 
villagers to be some evilly disposed medicine man, who 
sought for noxious herbs and who was confidently 
believed to have poisoned a man in Motiers who died 
in the agonies of nephritic colic. 

On several other counts also, the inhabitants 
did not take kindly to the strange philosopher, 
and their dislike at length culminated in the 
arrival of a large stone, flung by a vigorous arm 
through the door into his room, where, fortunately, it 
fell dead at the philosopher's feet. A little later, 
J. J., " as timid and shy as a virgm," as he himself 
assures us, quitted inhospitable Motiers for the Island 
of St. Pierre in the Lake of Bienne, where his life for 
several months was an idyll, well suited to his virginal 
character. Most readers of Rousseau will remember 



i86 ROUSSEAU AS BOTANIST 

his delightful description of this brief sojourn in *' Les 
Reveries d'un Promeneur Solitaire." 

Having sent for his Theresa, who arrived at his 
summons with all his books and effects, the botanist 
recommenced his scientific labours. There was ample 
opportunity. With the customary hyperbolical turn 
of phrase that makes us love him, Rousseau relates 
how, armed with the " Systema Naturae " of Linnasus 
and a magnifying glass, he wandered over the island 
determined to leave not a blade of grass unanalyzed, 
and murmuring to himself, in ecstatic repetition, the 
only prayer of an inarticulate old lady — " Oh " — 
which drew from the Bishop the enconium : " Good 
mother, continue thus to pray : your prayer is better 
than ours." 

Rousseau's idea was to write a monograph of all 
the plants on the island, a purpose quickly overthrown 
by the receipt, presently, from the Government of 
Berne of a peremptory notice to quit. And so the 
Flora Petrinsularis was never written.* 

Accepting David Hume's invitation to visit 
England, J. J. is soon settled among the Derbyshire 
hills, and, at Wootton, took immense delight in 
climbing the surrounding heights in search of curious 
mosses, convinced at last that the discovery of a single 
new plant was a hundred times more delightful than 

* I believe Rousseau's herbarium is now in the Berlin 
Museum. 



ROUSSEAU AS BOTANIST i8; 

to have the whole human race listening to his sermons 
for half an hour. What more can science require of 
a man ? 

After the break with Hume, Rousseau, by this time 
certainly a victim of persecution mania, fled back to 
France, and lived for some time under the tutelage of 
the Prince de Conti at Trye, near Gisors. Here he 
continued his botanical studies and the writing of the 
" Confessions," in a state of seraphic happiness so long 
as he was able unmolested to make long collecting 
excursions, to classify and arrange his herbarium or 
to watch the growth of some specimen from the seed. 
" Parvenu dans les lieux," he wrote, *' ou je ne vois 
nulles traces d'hommes je respire plus a mon aise 
comme dans un asyle ou leur haine ne me poursuit 
plus." 

Later on, he was accompanied by Bernardin dc St. 
Pierre in these country rambles. " We had gone 
through part of a wood," writes Bernardin in an 
account of one of their joint excursions, " when in the 
midst of the solitude, we perceived two young girls, 
one of whom was arranging the other's hair." It is not 
unfair to inquire if the amorous J. J., before a scene 
like this, felt no temporary vacillation in his allegiance 
to the science of botany. 

While staying at Grenoble, during the course of a 
botanical excursion with one Sieur Bovier, an advocate 
of that place, whom our solitary walker, as a mark of 



i88 ROUSSEAU AS BOTANIST 

especial confidence, had invited to accompany him, 
Rousseau presently began to refresh himself by eating 
the fruit of a plant, the Sieur meanwhile remaining at 
his side, without imitating him and without saying 
anything. Suddenly a stranger, newly arrived, ex- 
claimed : " Ah, Monsieur, what are you doing ? Don't 
you know that fruit is poisonous ?" 

" Why did you not warn me ?" Rousseau inquired of 
the Sieur. 

" Oh, Monsieur," said he, " I dared not take that 
liberty." 

Rousseau smiled at the fellow's " Dauphinoise 
humilite," and suffered no ill effects from his little 
collation. 

At first one is inclined to think that J. J.'s interest 
in botany was only another of his many " affaires du 
cceur." Closer examination soon shows that it was 
something more. His book on the elements of botany, 
consisting of a series of letters addressed to the 
Duchess of Portland and to other ladies, and his un- 
finished dictionary of botanical terms, reveal the 
author as a serious student of the science. Terms like 
" gymnosperm " and " petiole " came as easily to 
Rousseau's pen as to the pen of a Malesherbe or 
Jussieu. He practised the art of dissection — an 
example which many botanists of to-day, who are 
probably ready to sniff at Rousseau's scientific attain- 
ments, would do well to follow — and he owns to a 



ROUSSEAU AS BOTANIST 189 

"passionate attachment to the ' Systema Naturae' of 
Linnaeus," which fact alone makes it impossible 
surely to account him anyone less than a botanist ! 

But this is not to say that Rousseau was a dry-as- 
dust. " Nothing is more singular," he wrote, " than the 
rapture, the ecstacy I felt at every observation I made 
on vegetable structure, and on the play of the sexual 
parts in fructification. The forks of the long stamina 
of the Self-heal . . . the explosion of the fruit of 
Balsam . . . and a hundred little acts of fructification 
filled me with delight, and I ran about asking people 
if they had ever seen the horns on the Self-heal, just 
as La Fontaine asked if Habbakuk had ever been 
read." 

This could not have been written by Mr. Punch's 
stereotyped fossil with spectacles, straw hat, baggy 
trousers, vasculum, and butterfly net — he is a joyless 
soul, mainly concerned with " a preoccupied name " or 
a nomen nudum. I doubt, in fact, if it could have been 
written by anyone except J. J. Rousseau — the senti- 
mental botanist. 

Of a surety, J. J. could boast of no academic dis- 
tinctions ; he carried on no original research ; he was a 
poor observer. He confesses that in botany he did not 
seek to instruct himself — it was too late for that. His 
idea was to pursue " a sweet and simple amusement " 
without any prodigious effort. All that he required 
was " une pointe et uji loup." To him botany was " an 



igo ROUSSEAU AS BOTANIST 

idle study," a retreat from the delirium of imagination 
and the persecution of mankind. If botany, he de- 
clared, be studied from motives of ambition and 
vanity, only to become an author or professor, all the 
charm of it vanishes, and plants become the instru- 
ments of our passion. 

In an amusing passage in the " Reveries," he care- 
fully weighs in the balance the respective attractions 
of the other sciences. The study of minerals, delight- 
ful as it is, meant costly experiments, furnaces, stifling 
vapours. Zoology also was a science full of difficulties 
and embarrassments to the virginal soul. How on 
earth was J. J. to observe, study, and dissect, to know 
the birds of the air, the fishes of the sea, and quadru- 
peds swifter than the wind — creatures " not more 
disposed to come and offer themselves for my research 
than I am to run after them and submit them to force." 
As he rightly observes, the study of animal life is 
nothing without dissection, and it would, therefore, 
be necessary for him — J. J. to wit ! — to cut up animals 
and extract their entrails, " amid all the frightful 
apparatus, the corpses, livid flesh, skeletons, disgust- 
ing intestines, and pestilential vapours " of an ana- 
tomical theatre : " ce n'est pas la sur ma parole que 
J. J. ira chercher ses amusements." 

A confessed dillettante then if you like, yet it is 
difficult to believe that Rousseau^s influence, as that of 
many another amateur without hood or diploma, was 



ROUSSEAU AS BOTANIST 191 

not salutary and felt. He taught men to regard 
Nature and botanists to regard plants. Botany was 
not merely a question of dates and names and disqui- 
sitions sought after in the dusty parchments of Galen 
and Dioscorides. Rousseau cared for none of these 
things. Botanists must search, observe, and conjec- 
ture for themselves with the plant before them and the 
book on the shelf. He insisted on the divorce of 
botany from medicine, an alliance which hampered 
research in the pure science and reduced the study of 
vegetable life to the rank of handmaiden to the 
pharmacopoeia. J. J. shared Montaigne's antipathy to 
physic and physicians, and the idea of his beloved 
plants being brayed in a mortar with a pestle and 
transformed into pills, plasters, and ointment revolted 
his romantic soul. Botany — that last stronghold of 
his imagination — must be jealously guarded against 
the calamity of defilement by association with such 
things as fever, stone, gout, epilepsy, and other ills of 
hateful, unhappy man. 

Consider the picture of those two bizarre misan- 
thropes — Jean Jacques Rousseau and Bernardin de St. 
Pierre — walking together into rural solitude and seek- 
ing there among the wild flowers what they could not 
find among their fellow-men ! 



1916. 



THE SCARABEE MONOGRAPHED* 

I. 

In the minds of most people, the naturalist is a rare 
and eccentric-looking animal, sometimes observed 
poking up the mud of a horse-pond or dissecting the 
internal economy of a tapeworm. He is commonly 
supposed to bear a close personal resemblance to the 
animals which he studies, and caricaturists always see 
him with a tail or a tentacle, or peeping from a burrow 
or perched upon the branch of a tree. 

Scarabees, however, are often very ordinary-looking 
people indeed, with no distinguishing mark to aid 
those who venture upon classification after a cursory 
survey. They are not all " professors " — though some 
may be peers of the realm. They do not all wear 
spectacles — though some effectively use an eyeglass. 
They may be called Charles, Bob, or Dick — and occa- 
sionally Algernon, Cosmo, or Randolph. They are 
not all eccentrics; not a few who have distinguished 
themselves in the great public arena of Scarabee 
endeavour, in private life have been politicians, 

* Reprinted from The Forum. 

193 13 



194 THE SCARABEE MONOGRAPHED 

courtiers, and ambassadors. Buff on is reported to 
have had a handsome person and magnificent diplo- 
matic manners. Baron de Geer (i 720-1 778), Marshal 
of the Court of Sweden and Knight of the Polar Star, 
was in his day the possessor of one of the largest 
fortunes in Sweden and a ver\' fine gentleman indeed. 
Yet his enthusiasm for "the innocent pursuit" of 
Entomology was such that on the publication of his 
famous " Memoirs on the History of Insects," he was 
induced in a fit of despair to burn the greater part of 
the impression because they failed to arouse the 
interest they deserved. 

Prejudices against the Scarabee's chosen pursuits 
are legion. In that delightful novel, " Two on a 
Tower," by Thomas Hardy, the author makes his hero 
an astronomer rather than a biologist, and puts him in 
a tower in the moonlight rather than in a ditch catch- 
ing frogs. It is urmecessary to be a novelist to see 
the advantage of that; moreover, the time is not yet 
when an enlightened public opinion can see in the 
biologist who labours in the mephitic atmosphere of 
horse-ponds a gentleman no whit the less romantic 
than an astronomer dogging " the secret footsteps of 
the heavens " ; yet the truth is that horse-ponds con- 
tain marvels as staggering as solar systems. 

The common idea is that Scarabee work is dirty, 
prosaic, ridiculous — a question of the number of legs 
in a caterpillar, of such technical blazonry as 



THE SCARABEE MONOGRAPHED 195 

" Metopidium high, supra-numerals elongate, clypeus 
peristomial." It means an exotic delight in some such 
sensational announcement in a letter to " Nature " as, 
say, the discovery of a new membrane in the ali- 
mentary canal of a lady-bird. If you possess a friend 
or relative with a penchant for spiders or beetles, 
remember to ask him jocosely when you meet, " Black 
beetles, eh ?" forgetting, I trow, the parable which tells 
how a certain great personage once accosted Gibbon 
after the publication of his third volume of " The 
Decline and Fall" with, "Well, Mr. Gibbon, still 
scribbling ?" (That an anatomist can be as voluminous 
as Mr. Gibbon is evident if I say that as recently as 
last year a German doctor, Herr Professor Voss, 
published a thick book recounting the structure of the 
thorax, or middle part only, of a single insect, a 
cricket.) 

But your contemptuous attitude the Scarabee likes 
not, though he usually ignores it. He is a happy man, 
indifferent to what the world may think, cultivating 
his own plot of happiness, rarely looking over the 
hedge and never to the horizon, self-contained, autono- 
mous. No one who has read Fabre, or Mr. and Mrs. 
Peckham on wasps, or turned over the plates of 
Lyonet^s great quarto volume on the structure of the 
caterpillar of Cossus, the Goat Moth, or any of the 
Scarabee classics, can fail to understand the fascina- 
tion of his pursuits and his absorption in them. He 



196 THE SCARABEE MONOGRAPHED 

nothing sees the whole day long, like the gallant 
knight enthralled by the beautiful and merciless lady 
of his heart. 

II. 

Scientific men often seem to the uninitiated to be 
seriously engaged upon apparently trifling and 
irrelevant matters. Isaac Newton under the apple-tree 
was probably blowing dandelion " clocks." Sir 
Francis Galten — to take a modern instance — used to 
walk about the streets of London pricking a piece of 
paper with a pin. He was collecting statistics of 
people's eyes, noses, chins, according to a method 
invented by himself for the foundations of the new 
science of eugenics. And so a zoologist, having com- 
pleted a charming book on the little sea-worm, Con- 
voluta roscojfensis, would have you believe that his 
Convoluta problems involve the security of the Empire 
or the redemption of man. Perhaps. But where is the 
worker who, confronted, as he often is, with the point- 
blank question, " What's the use of your work ? Why 
trouble to find out if an earth-worm has a heart or 
whether pigs have wings ?" has the courage to reply, in 
the sense of vulgar utility in which the question is 
put : " My dear good sir, no earthly use at all. Good- 
day." Of no more practical utility, that is, than, shall 
we say, a Grecian urn or a lyric by Colonel Lovelace. 

That, on occasion, his labours are of service to the 



THE SCARABEE MONOGRAPHED 19; 

community is a fact sufficiently brought home to most 
of us recently, when his knowledge of the structure, 
life-history, and habits of such common and danger- 
ous enemies to health as the housefly, the flea, and the 
louse, has been at the disposal of those responsible for 
the health of troops in the field and of non-com- 
batants at home. But economic zoology is only a 
bypath in the multifarious labours of the Scarabee, 
and perhaps it would be less presumptuous for him to 
adopt as his motto and justification Laurence Sterne's 
witty remark that "where the heart leaps out before 
the understanding it saves the judgment a world of 
trouble." 

His affections are distributed over the whole Animal 
Kingdom. To the pious Scarabee, no animal is so 
mean or so minute as not to attract his respectful 
attention. Anything with legs, a pulsating vacuole, 
a waving tentacle, is sufficient to awake responsive 
chords. It would warm the cockles of the coldest 
heart to hear the Ichneumonidae specialist refer affec- 
tionately to the " Iks," or the expert Conchologist 
smilingly pronounce " Strombs." The blind Huber, 
who by the aid of his devoted assistant laid the 
foundations of all our knowledge of the bees' com- 
munity, regarded bees with something more than mere 
afl^ection, we are told. " Beaucoups de gens aiment 
les abeilles," says Gelieu, " je n'ai vu personne qui les 
aima mediocrement. On se passione pour elles." 



igS THE SCARABEE MONOGRAPHED 

Recollecting, perhaps, the sentiment expressed by 
Boyle, that nothing can be unworthy of investigation 
by man that was not unworthy of being created by 
God, a member of the wealthy Rothschild family is at 
the present moment the foremost authority on the 
Siphonaptera, a name which polite students give to 
fleas. In the lay mind the flea is only a joke — and 
always one which must be cracked. But, " pour les 
vrai savans," he is a serious and very attractive study 
in comparative anatomy, bionomics, and metamor- 
phosis. Even lice have never lacked students. Henry 
Denny monographed the British species as early as 
1842. The " Monographia Anopluorum Britanniae " is 
a very curious old book, concluding with a quotation 
from the 91st Psalm: "These all wait upon Thee 
that Thou mayest give them their meat in due 
season." 

Good Sir Thomas Browne said that he could digest 
a salad gathered in a churchyard as easily as one from 
a garden. " At the sight of Viper or Toad," he adds, 
" I And in me no desire to take up a stone and destroy 
them." Every Scarabee would like to shake his hand 
for saying that. And yet some women there are who 
would prefer Lady Godiva's ordeal to a struggle with 
a mouse in a closed room. Oliver Goldsmith owned 
to an " invincible aversion to caterpillars." Ambrose 
Par^ the father of modern surgery, mentions the case 
of a man who always fainted at the sight of an eel. 



THE SCARABEE MONOGRAPHED 199 

There are four or five pages in Victor Hugo's " Les 
Travailleurs de la Mer " spent in libelling medusae 
and cuttlefish. 

III. 

If we are to arrive at the very citadel of the 
Scarabee's soul, it now becomes necessary to proceed 
with circumspection. He is a wary animal, particu- 
larly over matters relating to the soul, the existence of 
which he will probably deny, while the heart he does 
not care to discuss except as the organ of circulation. 
So, having caught your hare, treat him gently, smooth 
out his pelage, win his confidence, and incredible 
revelations shall follow. The learned old gentleman 
who is preparing a catalogue of the Chalcididae, you 
imagined was engrossed merely in nomenclature, 
chaetotaxy, and other technical matters. He is really 
a glutton for form and colour in the insect world. The 
vision of a nervous or vascular system, or the 
musculature of a limb, pleases the anatomist's eye 
almost as much as it satisfies his intellectual curiosity. 
" Isn't it nice ?" he will say to you, his eyes ablaze 
with pleasure. 

Alfred Russel Wallace wrote of his young days that 
he possessed a strong desire to know the causes of 
things, a great love of beauty in form and colour, and 
a considerable but not excessive desire for order and 
arrangement in whatever he had to do. Character- 



200 THE SCAIL\BEE MONOGRAPHED 

istically enough, naturalists cherish a keen delight in 
those colour patterns and symmetrical arrangements 
of parts that can be drawn with set-square and com- 
passes — the radiate forms of starfish, sea-urchins, and 
medusae, or the exquisite bilateral symmetry of Nereis 
and a hundred other beautiful sea-worms. They may 
not be versed in chioroscuro and the principles of 
composition, but the essential thing they have : the 
artist's love of beauty in form and colour — love with- 
out which, as Heine says, the sun will only measure so 
many miles in diameter, the flowers will only be classi- 
fied by the number of their stamens, and the water will 
be merely wet. 

The devotion of the naturalist to his work is cer- 
tainly the chief salient in his character. Enthusiasm 
with him is always at boiling-point — much to the 
irritation of those less well endowed with nervous 
energy ! It is thrilling to read of the celebrated 
Bonnet of Geneva (who discovered parthenogenesis in 
animals) watching a plant louse from four o'clock in 
the morning until seven in the evening, or of the 
superhuman labours of Swammerdam, who ransacked 
earth, air, and water for insects, and who often spent 
whole days in cleaning the fat from a single caterpillar 
in order to be better able to study its anatomy. 

Robert Louis Stevenson would doubtless have asked, 
before giving rein to his praise of Bonnet, if he could 
play the flute or take a hand at cards. Even less 



THE SCARABEE MONOGRAPHED 201 

whimsical critics would be glad, I fancy, if it could be 
said that Sw^ammerdam once shouted " Damn the 
caterpillar," and went and got a glass of ale. Most 
laymen would lose their patience with the great 
French zoologist, Lacepede,* who continued to write 
his " L'Histoire des Poissons " during the most dis- 
turbed period of the French Revolution. During this 
present Armageddon, many a Scarabee's head is still 
bent over his dissecting dish when the milkman comes 
round in the morning. 

Listen, too, to the ominous opening of an obituary 
notice which appeared a few years ago in the Scara- 
bee's Mofithly Magazifte: 

" Twenty years too late for his scientific reputation, 
cifter having done an amount of injury to Entomology 
almost inconceivable in its magnitude, Francis Walker 
has passed from us." 

And yet, to the truly philosophic mind, why should 
fishes be any less interesting than revolutions, and 
indeed why not undertake the castigation of a criminal 
like Mr. Walker with as much ferocious enthusiasm as 
other folk — with other enthusiasms — employ to plead 
for a National Theatre or Food Reform ? 

Enthusiasm for a great cause, w^e know" from the 
copybooks, is a noble sentiment, and enthusiasm even 
for worms, insects, or somebody's patent pills has a 

* Lacepede's interests were, however, quite wide, and he 
pubHshed a general history of Europe in eighteen volumes. 



202 THE SCARABEE MONOGRAPHED 

"je ne sais quoi" that is divine. I admit that at 
times — for example to hear an odonatologist (i,e.y a 
student of the science which treats of dragonflies ! ) 
exclaim, with the emphasis of real emotion, " There is 
something radically wrong with our conception of the 
radial sector" (a small vein in the dragonfly*s wing) — 
one reflects sadly that enthusiasm of any kind must be 
bought with a price, and there are plenty of naturalists 
who have gladly paid it — in the loss of health and 
eyesight, in the sacrifice of their wealth, their pro- 
fession, and even their domestic happiness (one has 
but to read the lives of naturalists to see this), and 
nearly all have surrendered voluntarily or involun- 
tarily almost all other vital interests. Charles Darwin 
was bound to admit that towards the close of his life 
all his early love of art, poetry, and music had 
evaporated. Surely here is the supreme sacrifice. 



IV. 

Even when due allowance is made for the dazzling 
attractions of biological research, it must be confessed 
that the researcher frequently takes himself and his 
work with an almost portentous seriousness. When 
the Scarabee bends his doting head over the ant heap 
or the microscope, one almost expects to see signs in 
the sky. The placid assertion of Oliver Goldsmith, in 
" The Animated Nature," that Natural History is the 



THE SCARABEE MONOGRAPHED 203 

occupation of the idle and speculative rather than of 
the busy and ambitious, is a grievous error in his eyes. 
In the field of natural history, nowadays at all events, 
the busy and ambitious may make great reputations — 
they may even come to sit on Committees and make 
presidential addresses, and receive what has been 
happily called " the anxious civilities of the undis- 
tinguished." 

There come moments, I fear, when the heart fails 
even the most courageous essayist who has undertaken 
to defend Scarabees. For the most part, they are fine 
fellows — men with the single eye and the whole body, 
full of the glow and light of a grand enthusiasm. But 
a few there are whom no counsel would put into the 
witness-box without a qualm. Yet, in the belief that a 
just tribunal will save the city for the sake of those 
righteous ones, I intend to present all the available 
evidence. 

Your really god-forsaken Scarabee, then, spends his 
life in dotting i's and crossing t's, in repeating over 
animals their Latin names like magic incantations, in 
totting up lists of the species that occur in his district. 
He is obsessed by the cult of the card index, by a 
mania for order and arrangement. He rivals Mr. 
Gradgrind in his desire for facts — facts swallowed 
with the same unwinking voracity as a crocodile 
swallows bricks. It thrills him to know that in the 
male flea there is one abdominal nervous ganglion less 



204 THE SCARABEE MONOGRAPHED 

than in the female — without necessarily wishing to 
understand the reason why. A Rossia discovered in a 
rock-pool makes a red-letter day in his Calendar 
because the find " extends its range " — yet you may be 
sure he has caught no inkling of the factors governing 
the distribution of cuttlefish. " It is my business," 
says he, " merely to record the facts," hating to suggest 
a theory of generalization through fear of being 
caught out by an exception to the rule. " Accuracy " 
to him is a holy word, pronounced with eyes lowered 
and the palms crossed over the breast ; " imaginative " 
is a term of opprobrium ; poetry means long hair ; the 
summer solstice is nothing but the probable time for 
the emergence of some insect from its cocoon, and 
Coniston or Chamouni he recalls merely as good 
treacling localities. Undignified jousts are not infre- 
quent : " He says that it is ' unthinkable ' that Carabus 
clathratus should occur in my parish," snarls a 
worsted Knight of the Pin, " but it is conceivable that 
that depends upon the thinker." He is a specialist: 
mention an Acmaea to an authority on the Helicidae 
and he yawns. To a lepidopterist, the hymenoptera 
are of no more interest than the cuneiform texts to a 
third-form boy. This type of Scarabee crouches over 
the group of animals selected for study like a dog 
growling over a bone : on the approach of a rival 
student there is trouble. " It is so nice to feel," 
remarked an ingenuous youth of about sixty summers, 



THE SCARABEE MONOGRAPHED 205 

'*that you know more of one particular subject than 
anybody else in the world ! " 

The specialist is a very extraordinary person. He 
will tell you — and he never tires of saying it, with an 
incomprehensible pride in the devastating infinity of 
the Kosmos — that a single organism requires for 
perfect elucidation more than the available grey 
matter of the human brain. And, summoning an 
intellectual courage of which few of us can boast, he 
lowers himself deep into the mine of knowledge, happy 
if, after an industrious life, he has dug out a few 
lumps of information about a crab or a fly in a mine- 
field which stretches from here to beyond the stars. 

Verily, only a specialist can understand " with what 
scope God builds the worm." 

But let me warn the reckless critic that any "old 
fossil " may on occasion suddenly turn on his traducers 
and confound them with an attitude which takes the 
heart by storm. A very old naturalist — a veteran 
Scarabee, in his day guilty of almost every Scarabee 
crime — found it in his heart to say to me one sunny 
morning in Devon : " I love the bees, the poppies, and 
the swallows. ' The beautiful swallows — be kind to 
them.' " He quoted Richard Jefferies. 

Few indeed realize with what scope God builds an 
occasional Scarabee. 



1915. 



I 



NEW METHODS IN NATURAL HISTORY* 

Natural History no longer consists in the casual 
observations made on a country ramble or a parochial 
visit by even so acute an observer as Gilbert White. 
White was an amiable country parson with a very real 
love of wild animal life. But " The Natural History 
of Selborne" is not a scientific work. To-day, 
Natural History is a science, so that judged by the 
high standard of exactness lately introduced into 
the study. White's book is not even Natural History — 
it must be classed in the literature of country life. 

A fundamental chcinge has been brought about by 
the fact that the modern student of animal life is not 
just an angler, a gunner, or a collector. He is a 
psychologist. And now that the change is made it 
seems natural enough that the naturalist with the life, 
habits, instincts, and intelligence of animals as his 
province should be primarily a psychologist trained to 
distinguish what he sees from what he infers. 

Reform has come none too soon. The contributors 
pf so-called wild-life articles to our popular magazines 

* Reprinted from The Worlds Work, 
207 



2o8 METHODS IN NATURAL HISTORY 

must be held mainly responsible for the prevalence of 
a false sentimentalism about the lives of the wild 
things. Bears, cats, frogs, mice, insects — all are 
credited with the emotions, the sensations, and even 
the faculties of human beings. Like Oliver Gold- 
smith's nightingales in that curious miscellany of fact 
and fancies, " The Animated Nature," they " talk an( 
tell each other tales," or they are made to suffer 
pathetic death in a snowstorm. Even the complex 
sentiment of justice has been lightly attributed tc 
rooks, because these noisy and troublesome birds have 
been seen bullying another of their own kind. 



" Literary Naturalists " 

The rigour of a training in psychology would soon 
convince these "literary naturalists," as they have 
been somewhat contemptuously called, of the harmful-i 
ness of their writing — which is innocent enough, as| 
"fairy tales," but which becomes dangerous, particu- 
larly to youthful " Nature students," when palmed off j 
as Natural History. Even Homer nods. For amid 
the close reasoning of " The Origin of Species " it is 
surprising to read Darwin's unwarrantable inference! 
that dogs have vivid dreams and powers of im-j 
agination because they yelp and struggle in theirj 
sleep. 

An excellent illustration of the danger of humaniz-l 



METHODS IN NATURAL HISTORY 209 

ing animals is given by Professor M. F. Washburn in 
her book, " The Animal Mind." She takes the case of 
the angry wasp. Now anger in our consciousness " is 
composed of," or as some may prefer to say, is accom- 
panied by, sensations of a quickened heart beat, 
altered breathing, a change in muscular tension, and 
")0 on. But the circulation of the " blood " (a sort of 
■efined chyle) in the wasp is fundamentally different 
from that of vertebrates. The wasp, too, has no lungs, 
but breathes through delicate ramifying tubes, called 
tracheae, while all its muscles are attached internally 
because its skeleton is everywhere external. What, 
then, must " anger " be like in a wasp's consciousness, 
if it has one. I leave the " literary naturalists " to say. 

Animal Anecdotes 

It is wise not only to refrain from using anthropo- 
morphic language in our animal studies, but also to 
resist the temptation to relate an anecdote. The 
anecdote is no longer admitted as evidence in Natural 
History. It is an armchair product. The psycho- 
logist knows too well the man who begins, " I once had 
a dog . . ." or, it may be, a pet canary bird, and while 
he takes a long pull from his pipe recalls from the 
recesses of his mind a casual and therefore dangerous 
observation — perhaps made years ago and never com- 
mitted to paper — by an "ntrained and probably 

14 



210 METHODS IN NATURAL HISTORY 

prejudiced observer who is now labouring under the 
desire to tell a good story. 

Romanes' "Animal Intelligence," still in this 
country regarded as the chief work on the subject of 
which it treats, is almost wholly anecdotal. 

But by the progressive naturalist who is carrying on 
methodical research along psychological lines, both 
the casual observation and the anecdote are ruled out 
of court, although he is not above catching an idea or 
a suggestion from either and making it a basis for 
future research. 

A glance at the papers now being published, some 
of them in new journals devoted to the science, will 
convey a useful impression of the style of the work 
which is being done both in the field and also by the 
sea-shore and in the laboratory. 

Here are a few of the titles of some of these research 
papers : " The Life and Behaviour of the Cuckoo " ; 
"A Comparison of the Reactions of a Species of 
Surface Isopod with those of a Cave Species"; 
" Oscillations of Littoral Animals Synchronous with 
the Movements of the Tide"; "An Experimental 
Determination of the Speed of the Migration of 
Salmon in the Columbia River"; "The Sense of 
Hearing in Frogs " ; " The Role of Vision in the 
Mental Life of the Mouse." 



METHODS IN NATURAL HISTORY 211 

How THE Study is Carried On 

It wiU be seen that naturalists are studying reac- 
tions, the senses of hearing, vision, and so on. They 
are also making careful comparisons of learning 
powers and habit formations. Scrupulous accuracy is 
observed in recording times and distances. Tables are 
drawn up, curves plotted. The work is given a mathe- 
matical flavour whenever and wherever necessary and 
feasible. 

Effort is always directed towards obtaining some 
measure of experimental control. In any case, careful 
consideration is given by the author when discussing 
his problem to the probable influences of the condi- 
tions on his results. In the days before this reforma- 
tion experiment was seldom used. 

An observer might perform an al fresco experiment 
for example with the frog by removing it from its 
breeding-pond and then recording its return, on this 
evidence submitting a case for the existence of a 
homing faculty in Amphibia. Such an experiment 
and a similar deduction therefrom have indeed been 
made. Yet to be worthy of consideration the record 
of the experimenter should contain data as to the 
depth and the surface area of the pond, the 
meteorological conditions at the time of the experi- 
ment, the number of animals released and the number 
recovered, the exact distances to which they were 



212 METHODS IN NATURAL HISTORY 

removed, and so on. Even then it has been shown 
that dangerous pitfalls await the unwary, although I 
may add that after all in all probability a small 
homing faculty does exist, consisting in a slight know- 
ledge of the topography of the surroundings of the 
pond. 

The introduction of careful experiment by trained 
psychologists has revolutionized (a big word, I know) 
Natural History, and psychology, too, for that matter. 
Of course experiment is apt to be artificial. Yet field 
work becomes unwieldy and inconclusive through lack 
of control. The ideal is to combine the methods of the 
laboratory with those of the field naturalist. To the 
work of the field is brought the critical interpretations 
of the psychologist, to the work in the laboratory the 
sympathy of the lover of wild-life, so that whether the 
naturalist takes experiment into the field or attempts 
to bring natural conditions into the laboratory, his 
aim is to make an exact study of the behaviour of 
animals in environment as natural as is compatible 
with experimental control. 

American and French Workers 
It is in America that most of this valuable regenera- 
tive work has been carried out. Dr. R. M. Yerkes, of 
Harvard, is a pioneer, who has opened up many new 
fields of investigation and drawn together a number of 
enthusiastic students who are following in his foot- 



METHODS IN NATURAL HISTORY 213 

steps. America can boast (as has been justly claimed 
for her) that she has made it worth while for Europe 
to take account of the science she has fostered. 

In France, the country which produced Reaumur, 
Huber, and Fabre, a band of workers have gathered 
around Georges Bohn at the Paris Institution Generale 
Psychologique, while in Germany, Switzerland, and 
Russia, adherents to the new Natural History may be 
found at work. But in England, where a prejudice 
exists against American scientific work, the movement 
hangs fire. No one is taking it up. Yet I believe it 
originated in England with a paper by Professor 
Lloyd Morgan, of Bristol, on the pecking instincts of 
the chick. 

In not adopting Professor Lloyd Morgan's attitude 
and applying his methods and developing them with 
other animals, English naturalists lost the opportunity 
of doing a signal service to the science of Natural 
History. 

A great amount of investigation is required to be 
done. Not only must old material forming our 
present knowledge of Natural History be worked over 
again, but the present boundaries of that knowledge 
must be extended, particularly among such animals as 
jellyfish, sea-anemones, sea-urchins, sea-worms, and 
other sea animals, the account of which in almost any 
standard work of Zoology is restricted to a descrip- 
tion of their anatomy, morphology, and physiology. 



214 METHODS IN NATURAL HISTORY 

and includes even the dull and difficult subject of their 
nomenclature. 

To the enthusiast in animal behaviour with an 
appetite for research the forests of Brazil could 
scarcely offer anything more tempting. Indeed it is 
an emh arras de riches ses. Research students are com- 
paratively few. If only it were possible to divert the 
untiring energy of collectors, or some of those 
naturalists engaged in totting up fauna lists or mak- 
ing new species, I am convinced that similar industry 
and perseverence in the study of live Natural History 
would be rewarded with many valuable discoveries. 

The Harvest 

The labourers may be few, but the harvest is already 
beginning to come in. Even the most popular and the 
best explored study of ornithology is being made to 
yield, wherever tapped, all kinds of important infor- 
mation. Our British birds have been studied for years 
by sportsmen, naturalists, and Nature students, and it 
has been too readily supposed that we know all that 
there is to be known about so homely a subject. Yet 
here there is at least one large lacuna which cannot be 
filled in with the rest of the map. 

In spite of the hundreds of bird books issuing from 
the press, it is very rare to find in any of them details 
of the constructing of the nest by the parent birds 
from day to day, though of course they will contain 



METHODS IN NATURAL HISTORY 215 

descriptions of its shape, materials of which it is built, 
the size and colour of the eggs. The reason is the 
simple and humiliating one of ignorance. Speaking 
generally, we do not know how the bird builds its 
nest, how it first begins with a few stray wisps, swing- 
ing in the wind, nor how it goes on to mould the shape 
and finally, perhaps, to add a roof. 

Nest-Building 

F. H. Herrick has written a good account of the 
nest-building of several common American birds. His 
work is illustrated by tables showing the building 
activity of the parent birds and diagrams of the con- 
struction of the nest at different stages. Although the 
Baltimore oriole builds such a firm and durable nest 
that feats of engineering skill have been attributed to 
it, it is significant that Herrick finds no marked 
exhibition of intelligence. The oriole does no 
deliberate weaving, no deliberate tying of knots. The 
whole of its behaviour during the nest-building, he 
thinks, is mechanical, and its wonderful nest is pro- 
duced by the activity of stereotyped instinctive 
actions. 

If this be true, the oriole's performance increases 
rather than diminishes our wonder. Herrick's attitude 
is characteristic of modern work, and illustrates the 
principle of interpretation known as Lloyd Morgan's 
Canon, which says that we ought never to interpret an 



2i6 METHODS IN NATURAL HISTORY 

action as the result of a higher faculty if it can be as 
well interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of a 
faculty lower in the psychological scale. Loeb has 
compared the reactions of animals to light, gravity, 
and so forth, with the reactions of plants to similar 
stimuli. For example, at the time of their nuptial 
flight bees are so attracted to light that by letting the 
light fall into the observation hive from above the bees 
crowd on the roof towards it and are so prevented 
from leaving the hive through the exit at the lower 
end. He calls this heliotropism, and he neatly describes 
these bees as -positively heliotropic. 

If one eye in the Mourning Cloak butterfly 
{Vanessa anliopa) is blackened it moves in a circle 
and behaves as if one eye were in the shade. Curiously 
enough, insects with both eyes blackened as a rule fly 
straight up into the sky, and Axenfeld suggests that 
this is to be explained on the supposition that light 
penetrates the integument of the head and the insect 
behaves positively. 



The Theory of Tropisms 

These are but a few of the observations which lend 
support to Loeb*s theory of tropisms and which have 
persuaded Bethe into the belief that all the complex 
social behaviour of the Hymenoptera is a question of 
reflex action without consciousness. This is a return 



METHODS IN NATURAL HISTORY 217 

to the automatism of Descartes. Yet Bethe's work 
with bees serves as a useful antidote to the florid 
manner of M. Maeterlinck, who has been termed " a 
scientist." 

A fascinating volume in Natural History will one 
day be devoted to Homing in Animals, or as it is 
more precisely termed " Distant Orientation." Snails 
return to the same retreat beneath a stone or in a 
crevice of the garden wall after their nocturnal pere- 
grinations. The land-crabs of the family Gecarcinidce 
advance downwards from the hills to the sea in great 
hosts, clambering over obstacles and even invading 
houses in their annual march to the sea for procreative 
purposes. The salmon returns to the same river to 
breed, the toad and newt return to the same pond, 
birds to the same nesting-site, while whales, bats, and 
other mammals carry on extensive migrations about 
which very little has yet been discovered. 



Visual Memory 

But the historic problem of homing in ants, bees, 
and wasps is the most thorny and perplexing of all. 
After long experiment with bees, in which the problem 
is complicated by the power of flight, Bethe gave up 
the problem as insoluble. Lord Avebury years ago 
took bees from a hive on the sea-coast, marked them, 
and set them loose at sea. But none returned, though 



21 8 METHODS IN NATURAL HISTORY 

the distance was less than their usual range of travel 
on land. 

So Buttel-Reepen argues that visual memory will 
explain all the facts. But Bethe argues against the 
vision hypothesis that if the entrance to a beehive be 
raised or lowered 30 centimetres the bees on returning 
will crowd to the old place, and it is sometimes hours 
or days before they adjust themselves to the new con- 
ditions. 

The same author took bees in a box a considerable 
distance from the hive. On being released they flew 
straight up into the air, but many dropped back into 
the box and only a part of the number found their 
way back to the hive. If the box, during their ascent, 
be moved only a few centimetres, the bees drop back 
into the place where the box formerly was and take no 
notice of the box in the new position. If they used 
vision, he argues, they would have seen the box and 
settled on it. 

Do Bees "Home"? 

It is evident that if bees do "home" by visual 
memory, their visual memory must be very different 
from ours. This is not to be wondered at, when the 
difference in the structure of the compound facetted 
insect eye from the vertebrate eye is taken into con- 
sideration. In a recent book, which will one day 
become a classic. Professor G. W. and Mrs. Peckham 



METHODS IN NATURAL HISTORY 219 

show that solitary wasps certainly depend on sight 
and landmarks. 

The puzzle has taxed the ingenuity of experimenters 
for years, and rarely a year passes without fresh 
contributions to the subject. 

Ingenuity of experiments is strikingly exhibited in 
a research by Dr. Yerkes on the sense of hearing in 
frogs. A frog — that martyr to research — was placed 
in a saddleback holder, so that its long hind limbs 
hung down free and limp, and any movement of the 
legs in response to stimulus could be read in milli- 
metres on a scale attached. In a careful study of frogs 
in the field, Yerkes could obtain no visible motor 
reactions whatever indicating a consciousness of 
sounds. This would have satisfied the old-fashioned 
naturalist. He would have expressed the opinion 
that frogs are deaf. 

But Yerkes perceived that in certain circumstances 
the frog, though perfectly conscious of sound, might 
inhibit its reactions to it. And this he proved to be 
the case. For though no response is given by the 
frog in the saddleback holder to auditory stimulus 
alone, yet a marked exaggeration in responses to 
tactual stimuli was obtained if the tactual stimuli 
were applied simultaneously with the auditory. 



220 METHODS IN NATURAL HISTORY 

The Study of Functions 

A great impetus to morphology and anatomy was 
given by Darwin's '' Origin of Species." A rush for 
homologues set in and other work became neglected. 
But now that the search is beginning to flag and 
silent workers are making their burrowings heard 
beneath the foundations of the germ-layer theory, 
naturalists are turning aside from the great and un- 
manageable problems of variation, heredity, and 
evolution to remember what they have been inclined 
to forget, that their specimens were once palpitating 
with life — with that elan de vie which moves and, as 
Bergson would say, moulds the anatomical parts. 

Bearing this in mind it is easy to understand why, 
among other things, investigations into a variety of 
sense organs in unexpected and out-of-the-way parts 
of the animal kingdom have hitherto usually stopped 
short with an account of their structure and minute 
anatomy, leaving their functions wholly conjectural. 
Kreidl as long ago as 1893 began the study of 
functions in these curious and out-of-the-way sense 
organs by proving in a convincing and — to the 
scientific type of mind — a very fascinating manner 
that the otocyst, a sacklike organ at the base of the 
second antenna of the prawn, Palcemon, and other 
Crustacea, open to the sea-water and, containing sand 
grains, is really a statocyst by which the animal 



METHODS IN NATURAL HISTORY 221 

maintains its equilibrium in the sea, and has nothing 
to do with the sense of hearing. 

Periodically the shrimp moults its skin, also with it 
the lining of the sacklike organ, together with its 
contained sand grains. So that for a time the sack is 
empty, till the new skin hardens and the shrimp 
burrows in the sand. Kreidl prepared iron sand and 
placed a freshly-moulted Falcemon at the bottom of 
the aquarium, with the result that after a time the 
statocysts became filled with minute iron grains 
instead of grains of silica. 

He then brought a magnet over the shrimp, and on 
working out his data mathematically he made the 
discovery that the shrimp took up a position under 
the influence of the magnet which corresponded with 
the resultant force of the pull of gravity and the pull 
of the magnet. This experiment of rare delicacy and 
refinement makes it clear that the sand grains, by 
stimulating the specialized cells of the sense organ, 
are a means of informing the shrimp of its position in 
the water. Indeed, if the statocysts are destroyed it 
swims upside down as readily as right side up. 

The Crustacea 

The Crustacea have furnished naturalists with 

material for several novel researches in behaviour. 

Till a few years ago this rich field was almost wholly 

unpre-empted. There existed some vague information 



222 METHODS IN NATURAL HISTORY 

about the robber crab (Birgus latrd), which ate cocoa- 
nuts and cHmbed trees. We knew the Hermit crabs 
carried anemones on their whelk shells and the curious 
little peacrabs (Pinnotheres) lived in the mantle 
cavity of mussels (a fact known to writers of antiquity). J 

But detailed studies in these and other curious and " 
complex instincts of Crustaceans had still to be made. 
The Hermit crab, whose odd economy attracted the 
attention of George Henry Lewes, and many other 
thinkers before and since, may sometimes be found in 
a whelk-shell in the upper whorls of which lives a sea- 
worm called 'Nereis^ and there may be in addition a 
sea anemone on the outside of the shell, the whole 
forming an interesting combination in commensal life, 
which requires careful working out by a competent 
observer. 

There is a small tropical crab, called Melia tessel- 
lata, which carries a sea anemone in each claw, and 
uses it as an instrument for obtaining food. Food 
particles caught by the tentacles of the anemones " are 
removed and eaten by the crab, which uses the long 
walking legs of the first pair." 

COMMENSALISM 

Many of these instincts have now been analyzed 
psychologically. The mysterious phenonema of 
commensalism in animals are sufficient to stimulate 
the curiosity of the dullet intellect, and the psycho- 



METHODS IN NATURAL HISTORY 223 

legist perceives that they raise many problems of 
first-rate importance to animal psychology. 

Father Wasmann, SJ., has devoted his energy to 
commensalism as it occurs in ants — and already his 
writings are becoming voluminous. Since the dis- 
covery in ants' nests of aphides — the " ant-cows " of 
popular literature — numbers of other insects of all 
orders have been recorded as inmates of ants' nests, 
and myrmecophilism is now a subject by itself. The 
list of myrmecophilous insects, many of which are 
specially modified for life in ants' nests, now include 
mites, beetles, caterpillars, springtails, dipterous larvae, 
coccidse (or scale insects), and orthoptera. 

But lack of space precludes the possibility of so 
much as mentioning some of the singular observations 
Wasmann has made on the life and behaviour of these 
guests of the ant. 

I could entertain the reader with the work of the 
Peckhams on courtship in spiders and the ridiculous 
attitudes they sometimes assume under the influence 
of sexual attractions. The naturalist would feel the 
charm in many of the experimental studies of Yerkes, 
particularly in the way in which he settled the ques- 
tion " Do kittens instinctively kill mice ?" He would 
be surprised to learn that the popular impression of 
extensive imitative abilities in monkeys has not been 
supported by experiment, and he would unquestion- 
ably be led on to contemplate some of the highest 



224 METHODS IN NATURAL HISTORY 

problems in animal psychology suggested by 
Watson's extraordinary work with rats. Watson 
maintains among other things that the rat possesses 
an unknown instinct by which it obtains an awareness 
of the direction of the four points of the compass, 
since his animals, trained to traverse a labyrinth of 
narrow passages in a few seconds, had to readjust 
themselves and partially re-learn the trick if the 
labyrinth of passages was moved in toto through an 
angle of 90 degrees. 

But if I have not by now stimulated the reader's 
interest, I have killed it, and the space at my disposal 
has drawn to an end. 



1912. 



SOME CURIOUS FACTS IN THE 
DISTRIBUTION OF THE BRITISH NEWTS* 

Some curious facts in the geographical distribution 
of the three British species of tailed amphibians have 
recently been brought to light. Modern investigations 
have proved that the well-known statements in regard 
to this subject which have been copied and re-copied 
in almost all the English works of Natural History, 
to the effect that the Greatcrested Newt (Molge 
cristata) and the Common Newt {M. vulgaris) are 
generally common, and that the little Palmate Newt 
{M. falmata) is very rare and has only been found 
"near Bridgwater, the Isle of Wight, and near 
Reading," are not only misleading but quite incorrect. 

The real facts, as recently elucidated, are these. 
The Palmate, so far from being rare, is very widely 
distributed. It is found from Cornwall to Sunderland 
and from Anglesea to the Isle of Wight. This con- 
spicuous and handsome little species, with webbed 
hind feet, is the only species recorded from Cornwall, 
where it is very common. In Devon, too, the Palmate 
can be found in every pond and roadside runnel, 

♦ Reprinted from Knowledge. 

225 15 



226 DISTRIBUTION OF BRITISH NEWTS 

while the Common Newt is absent, and the Great- 
crested, until a short time ago, was thought to be 
absent likewise. Some few months since, I discovered 
the latter species in a pool in North Devon, but before 
that time no authentic Devonshire specimen existed 
in collections. In Somerset M. cristata appears fre- 
quently, but is local, while as far up as Gloucester, the 
Palmate begins to grow local as well. Turning to 
Wales, it is important to notice the same conditions 
prevailing as those in the S.W. Peninsula, viz., the 
occurrence of the Palmate form to the almost total 
exclusion of the other two. As to the rest of England 
and to Scotland, the Palmate Newt is generally 
common but local ; it has been recorded from a large 
number of counties, and also from Anglesea, Bardsea 
Island, the Isle of Rum, and the Isle of Wight ; there 
are no newt records either from Lundy or the Scilly 
Islands. Professor James Clark informs me that he 
has seen no newt alive on the Scilly Islands, but there 
is, in his possession, a specimen of the Palmate species, 
which was captured by a resident of St. Mary's, near 
Porthellick Bay. On the other hand, Mr. T. A. 
Dorrien-Smith, who was good enough to make careful 
inquiries for me, was unable to find any evidence of 
the existence of newts on the islands. Ireland pos- 
sesses only one species and that, contrary to all 
expectation, proves to be M. vulgaris. Dr. R. F. 
Scharff has found it, in its typical form, in about 



DISTRIBUTION OF BRITISH NEWTS 227 

twenty localities N., S., E., and W. Reported occur- 
rences of two species have always been founded on the 
sexual differences in the Common Newt. 

Fossil remains are very scanty; bones, which are 
referable to the Greatcrested species and were dis- 
covered in the Forest Bed, appear to constitute the 
sole record. With such conflicting evidence as this, it 
seems to be quite impossible to decide which species 
is, phylogenetically, the oldest. According to the 
evidence of palaeontology Cristata is the oldest, 
according to distribution in Great Britain and its 
occurrence on several outlying islands we should be 
led to expect Palmaia, then Dr. Scharff's report from 
Ireland arrives and makes the problem a three- 
cornered one ; for it is safe to assume that, during the 
time of the hypothetical connection of Ireland with 
England, M. vulgaris was the only species existing, 
as it was the only one to cross the boundary into 
Ireland. It should therefore be the oldest. 

The more remarkable facts, in connection with the 
distribution of these little amphibians, are to follow. 
It is now agreed on all hands that M. palmata is 
exceedingly common in Devon and Cornwall, the 
Common Newt absent, and the Greatcrested almost 
unknown. But all the older naturalists in the two 
counties were agreed in recording Cristata and 
Vulgaris^ but Palmata only rarely. Thus the late 
Mr. Brooking Rowe, in a letter to Mr. E. E. Lowe (a 



228 DISTRIBUTION OF BRITISH NEWTS 

former curator of the Plymouth Museum), which was 
published in the " Victoria C. Hist. Devon," says : 
" As to the Smooth Newt {M. vulgaris) I am surprised 
at what you say (that it did not occur in the county). 
It was, without question, the common species some 
years ago and found everywhere. I was the first to 
record T. falmatusy and found it in a pond not far 
from here (Plympton)." We are driven to believe, 
either that the older naturalists failed to distinguish 
the obvious differences in the two species, or else, the 
more probable hypothesis, that within late years 
M. -palmata has increased to such an extent that it has 
almost completely ousted the other two. 

No less a person than the late Professor Edward 
Forbes (who was a Manxman) stated that " T. palus- 
tris and T. punctatus were by no means uncommon in 
their different habitats everywhere" on the Isle of 
Man. But no newts now exist there. If the older 
naturalists, with Professor Forbes, wrongly identified 
these newts, the former may gain a little consolation 
from the fact that they have sinned in good company. 

However, I am strongly inclined to believe that for 
some considerable time past, the Palmate has been 
increasing in numbers, and widening its range to the 
prejudice of the other species. Its small size enables it 
to live in very small ponds and ditches, it has the 
widest distribution, and is the only species which is 
found in mountain pools. It would, therefore, seem to 



DISTRIBUTION OF BRITISH NEWTS 229 

be able to stand greater variations in climate and en- 
vironment. It is exceedingly unlikely that Professor 
Forbes should have made so glaring an error. It is 
easier to suppose that, in a succession of unfavourable 
years, when, among other things, an unusually small 
rainfall occurred, the two Manx species, M. cristata and 
M. vulgar is y became extinct on the island. The Palmate 
would be the most capable of withstanding these con- 
ditions, and would increase and multiply in other 
parts of the country, where, previously, it had already 
gained a footing. A careful study of newts in their 
natural habitats, over a series of years, affords con- 
vincing proof of a considerable rise and fall in the 
number of individuals of each species, in different 
seasons, which is, as often as not, quite inexplicable; 
at all events in terms of weather and climate. I think 
it highly probable that, on account of a recent super- 
vention of a powerful combination of unfavourable 
conditions — just when, during one of these fluxes, the 
numbers were at the minimum — the Common and 
Greatcrested Newts have become extinct in many 
places, where they were once common, the result being 
that the hardier Palmate, left master of the field, has 
shot ahead and won in the struggle for existence. 
This increase (and the subsequent migration and dis- 
persal which has occurred) presents a most interesting 
and unexpected phenomenon. 

1909. 



BIRD ROOSTS AND ROUTES* 

The following paper does not pretend to be an 
exhaustive one, but is the result of my own observa- 
tions during the past winter in a North Devon district. 

All birds show considerable care in the choice of a 
secure roosting site, and in order to spare labour in 
looking for a fresh one every night, they frequently 
return to the same place continuously. 

A great many of the small species roost in company, 
" cuddling," or keeping close together in a bunch for 
warmth. I have found four Wrens roosting in this 
way in a hole in a tree, and have disturbed several 
sleeping in their " cock " nests, but as far as my notes 
go, these are generally vacant. On one occasion last 
summer I noticed several Long-tailed Tits (probably 
a brood) on the top of their nest, which had become 
quite flattened and was covered with droppings. I 
expect, therefore, that they returned to the nest every 
night, and when they got too large, roosted on the top 
of it. Wrens up to the number of thirty at a time, 
Long-tailed Tits, and Golden-crested Wrens, are 
recorded as roosting together in this " bunching " 
* Reprinted from British Birds 
231 



232 BIRD ROOSTS AND ROUTES 

fashion by Mr. G. A. B. Dewar (in the " Birds of Our 
Wood "). One night I saw two Blue Tits embracing 
each other in this way in an apple-tree. They looked 
like one large bird, so close to each other were they. 
This is not, however, the usual habit of this Tit, for it 
generally roosts in holes. 

The Sparrow, as is well known, will occupy an old 
House-Martin's nest, or will line a hole in the thatch 
with feathers. Partridges roost on the ground, while 
Pheasants and fowls prefer to roost in trees. 

A Hedge-sparrow, which I had under observation, 
returned every evening last winter with the utmost 
regularity to a cranny among dead ivy on an elm. 
When driven out it would return in a few moments, 
first pitching on a branch of the tree, and then swiftly 
sneaking into the cranny, so that its return very fre- 
quently escaped my notice entirely. 

Kestrels roost at the same spot, in a quarry, for 
example, for many consecutive weeks. 

The Pied Wagtail and the Grey Wagtail in this 
district collect in some numbers every evening, and 
roost in reed beds, like the Starlings. They drop in 
from all directions, but do not come from more than 
a mile distant. As a rule they collect on the ground, 
or telegraph wires, near the reed bed, before disap- 
pearing into the reeds, calling, and flying short- 
distances in one flock. This flock increases as the 
birds come up one by one, and finally they drop into 



BIRD ROOSTS AND ROUTES 233 

the reeds, where they are joined by Robins and 
Wrens. 

A great many species of birds roost in company, 
notably Starlings. Others are : House-sparrows, 
Carrion Crows (especially in Devon and Somerset), 
Magpies, Rooks, and Wood-pigeons. 

In North Devon, in the colder months of the year, 
the Rooks never roost in their rookery during, at all 
events, the months of November, December, January, 
February, and part of March, but they collect in large 
numbers and roost in a wood, perhaps two or three 
miles away from the rookery. In the morning the 
roost breaks up, and the members of each community 
repair, with the utmost regularity, to their respective 
rookeries. At the rookeries they stand about " talk- 
ing," perhaps till nine o'clock, and then they disperse 
to feed and meet again in the evening at the roost. 
If the morning is a frosty one they stay on the rookery 
trees longer than usual. 

At Tapely Park, Jackdaws collect in prodigious 
quantities, numbering many thousands (though it 
is extremely difficult to judge the number), and 
roost in the beech-trees. A roost of Rooks occupies 
the same group of trees. The interesting feature 
connected with these Jackdaws is that the birds, 
in going to and from their roost, always take 
exactly the same route. A large flock which, during 
part of its course, is forced to fly over the town of 



234 BIRD ROOSTS AND ROUTES 

B , always flies across exactly the same part of the 

town every evening. It was by watching and follow- 
ing up for several days another big flock (numbering 

200 or 300), which fed daily in the fields at B 

(about three and a half miles from the roost) through- 
out the whole of last winter, that I finally discovered 
this large roost. Every morning and every evening 
this flock as regularly as a Royal Mail performed this 
journey. They follow very carefully the same line of 
flight, even to the barest detail, but occasionally they 
fly very high, and they then appear to follow a more 
direct course, for it is noteworthy that these birds do 
not, as a rule, make a bee-line by any means. The 
reason why they sometimes fly at a great height I 
cannot imagine. I do not think that it has anything 
whatever to do with wind or weather. Arrived at the 
roost, the birds " rocket " down perpendicularly, 
dropping like plummets, and commence to " chock " 
for an hour or more before darkness falls. Starlings 
and Wood-pigeons, when dropping in to roost, 
" rocket " down in this same eccentric way, and many 
birds behave similarly at times, when they may be 
said to be " at play." The habit with the roosting 
birds is, however, a constant one, and takes place 
every evening. 

Far more striking evidence as to the use of flight- 
lines in these miniature migrations is to be seen in the 
case of the Starling. A large Starling roost is a very 



BIRD ROOSTS AND ROUTES 235 

imposing sight, and has attracted the attention of a 
great many writers. The very remarkable turns of 
flight displayed by these birds at roosting time con- 
stitute, perhaps, one of the most striking phenomena 
which British bird-life has to show. 

In this district there are four or five such 
roosts. I have not discovered the birds travelling 
more than six miles to and from the roost. I have 
repeatedly noticed how strictly the birds keep to their 
arbitrarily prescribed line of flight. The best instance 
I can give is shown in the accompanying map. 

The flocks sweep along this main course with 
astonishing regularity every night, flock succeeding 
flock, and each separate flock pursuing the same 
course, as a rule dividing at X, one half going to one 
roost, and the other half to another roost. They fly 
high — well above the neighbouring hills and valleys — 
although it will be noticed that they follow a valley 
for some distance; this route, moreover, was not 
merely roughly followed, but the birds came accur- 
ately along an almost mathematically straight line, as 
far as X. 

On February 19th I was at this spot watching the 
Starlings. I was particularly interested In one flock 
which never arrived along the usual, main, flight-line, 
but cut into it at right angles (as indicated in the 
sketch map). This flock, on this particular evening, 
however, appeared to have lost its bearings, for it 



236 



BIRD ROOSTS AND ROUTES 



wandered about, as I show in the sketch, as if trying 

to cross C Hill, which the birds never did at any 

time; finally, it seemed to perceive its whereabouts, 
doubled back and went on, crossing the 400-foot 
ridge. On the 22nd, this same flock was making for 
the roost, flying against a heavy westerly gale. Hard 
weather and frost seems to make no diminution in 







numbers at the roosts. I may mention here that on 
every occasion that I have visited a Starling roost last 
winter (about seven times) there was always a 
Sparrow-hawk flying close at hand, and I have 
repeatedly seen this Hawk harrying flocks as they 
came in to roost. 

Individual flocks, when perhaps three miles away 



BIRD ROOSTS AND ROUTES 237 

from their roost, and out of the main stream of 
" migration," followed, I found, in the few cases I had 
under observation, the same route every night. One 
small flock, for example, always crossed the River 

T at a certain point near a signal-box, for several 

weeks last winter. Routes, however, like these, on the 
extreme periphery of the system, vary when the par- 
ticular flock changes its feeding quarters. 

Possibly some of the foregoing will have to be 
modified after more prolonged observation, but the 
main point will hold — the universal use of flight-lines 
by Starlings and Jackdaws in going to and from their 
roost. 

Whether birds, with their large semicircular canals, 
have a sense of direction or whether their migrations 
are carried out by the aid of the sun or by the earth's 
magnetism or any other power is moot, yet one thing 
seems certain and that is that they possess a powerful 
memory. I feel sure that however the migrational 
movement as a whole is effected, the way in which the 
Swallow returns year after year to the same old beam 
in the same old barn is simple memory — topo- 
graphical knowledge of the chief natural features and 
the general mould of the country in the neighbourhood 
of its nesting home. 

1908. 



THE "ANIMATED NATURE" 

Oliver Goldsmith might have been a naturalist 
had the opportunity presented itself. But it was his 
lot to earn his daily bread by scribbling catchpenny 
compilations for the booksellers, and in the spare 
moments to fight for fame by modelling his works of 
genius. If he had only been granted a few more spare 
moments, he could have spent them in the woods and 
fields, and we should find his "Animated Nature" 
full of original observation, and in every respect quite 
a different book. 

Of his few opportunities for studying nature he 
made the very best; and there is pathos in the fact 
that, through watching the ways of the spider in the 
dusty little garret in Green Arbor Court, he was after- 
wards able to contribute an article on its habits to 
" The Bee." Then one reads of his observing the 
antics of the Rooks from the Inner Temple; walking 
in the lanes around the farmhouse on the Edgware 
Road — another of his lodgings; and, in his happy 
Irish days, following the gentle art of Izaak Walton, 
whose pretty writing he since lived to honour with 
praise. During these short periods of leisure, he saw 

239 



240 THE "ANIMATED NATURE" 

more, thought more, and admired more thcin do many 
in a lifetime. The high position he now holds in the 
world of letters he owes primarily to his great love of 
the country and the rural life — depicted in " The 
Deserted Village" and "The Vicar of Wakefield." 

The chief fault in " Animated Nature " is that it is 
a compilation. Goldsmith borrows from a large 
number of authors, including Buff on, Aristotle, Pliny, 
Linnaeus, Pennant, and Swammerdam; he would 
probably have done better if he had quoted fewer 
authorities, and those more judiciously. The whole 
eight volumes are interspersed with many absurd 
stories about beasts and birds, which his innate sim- 
plicity led him half to believe. I will mention a few. 
Quoting, I believe, Linnaeus, he says that a Squirrel, 
when it wants to cross a river, finds a piece of bark, 
sets it afloat, and goes aboard; it reaches the other 
side by using its tail like a fan or windmill ! Imagine 
this timid, unobtrusive creature, with the cunning of a 
Monkey, watching its anchored " bark " as it waits for 
a flood-tide or a favourable wind. 

We are informed that the Albatross, on flying to an 
immense height, tucks its head under one wing, and 
keeps afloat by flapping the other; thus it roosts. 
" What truth there may be in this statement I will not 
take upon me to determine," is his comment. 

Goldsmith was quite aware of his ignorance of the 
natural sciences, and he makes no attempt to hide it 



THE "ANIMATED NATURE" 241 

(for, in spite of his vanity, he was unwilling appar- 
ently to assume an affectation of great learning) ; but, 
nevertheless, the fear he shows of passing decisive 
opinions, even on such fables as these, is amusing. 

Certain Nightingales are related as being so clever 
that they could talk like Parrots, and tell each other 
tales. " Such is the sagacity ascribed to the Night- 
ingale," he remarks drily. 

These wondrous stories are at all events amusing, 
and Dr. Johnson prophetically remarked, " He is now 
writing a Natural History, and he will make it as 
interesting as a Persian tale." But the extravagant 
imageries of a Persian tale would not go to form an 
ideal history of animated nature. The book might 
have been even more fanciful, for in the preface Gold- 
smith writes that, before he had read the works of the 
great French scientist Buffon, it was his intention to 
treat what he then conceived to be an idle subject 
" in an idle manner " ; for let us " dignify Natural 
History," he says, "with the grave appellation of an 
useful science, yet still we must confess that it is the 
occupation of the idle and speculative rather than of 
the busy and ambitious." 

All is written in Goldsmith's vivacious style, and 
the first two volumes are to a certain extent excellent 
in subject matter, for he was able to make use of 
Buffon as far as the end of the history of quadrupeds. 
But in justice to Goldsmith, it must be said that he 

16 



242 THE "ANIMATED NATURE" 

had this help where he least needed it, as, in dealing 
with the earth, with man, and with the well-known 
wild beasts, he had his own engaging descriptive 
powers, his own knowledge of human nature and 
anatomy, and a multitude of books, other than Buf¥on, 
fairly correct in their accounts of the larger mammals. 

Consequently, Goldsmith can, "with some share of 
confidence," recommend this part to the public, and I 
suggest that his chapters on " Sleep and Hunger," and 
" Smelling, Feeling, Tasting," are as entertaining as 
any in the book. In his history of birds and insects 
he is very meagre and confused, like Pliny. His 
account of the reptiles is, as one would expect, full of 
those curious mythical tales, in which Goldsmith 
revelled more than in scientific facts. In many places 
throughout this unique Natural History one relishes 
the numerous personal references which he introduced 
into most of his writings, and here and there some 
really fine prose, as fine as any he ever penned. 

The naturalist will find amusement in assigning 
descriptions to their right owners, and in discovering 
the names of species but vaguely characterized. Then 
there is humour, which, although unconscious, should 
not on that account be omitted from among the 
merits of the book — merits that deserve wider recog- 
nition. Of his personal references, I must not pass 
over his touching remarks on " Hunger," which he 
wrote perhaps at a time when he felt his own wants 



THE " ANIMATED NATURE " 243 

becoming more serious day by day : " In the begin- 
ning the desire for food is dreadful indeed, as we 
know by experience. . . . Those poor wretches, 
whose every day may be said to be an happy release 
from famine, are known at last to die in reality of a 
disorder caused by hunger, but which in common 
language is often called a broken heart." That death 
was his own, said Forster in his " Life." He (Gold- 
smith) pities Aldrovandus, the naturalist, whose 
undeserving end was poverty and death in a public 
hospital, but how much the more should we lament 
his untimely decease. Goldsmith might have lived on 
his own earnings, but undoubtedly he was extrava- 
gant. Yet could not the friendly Reynolds, or the 
kind-hearted Johnson have helped him through the 
mire, or attempted to strengthen those weaknesses, 
which, in so great and unfortunate a man, we should 
all be willing to overlook ? 

Turning again to "Animated Nature," let us see 
what Goldsmith has to say of the pugnacity of the 
Pufhn. As soon as a Raven approaches to carry off 
its young, the Puffin, making a curious noise like a 
dumb person trying to speak, catches him under the 
throat with its beak, and sticks its claws into its 
breast, which "makes the Raven try to get away." 
At length both fall into the sea, the Raven, of course, 
drowning, to leave the Puffin to return unharmed to 
its nest, 



244 THE " ANIMATED NATURE » 

The Woodpecker feeds sometimes in the following 
way. It lays its tongue on an ant-hill, and waits 
until there are a sufficient number of ants collected on 
it (for they mistake the long tongue for a worm), 
when the clever bird suddenly withdraws " the worm " 
and the ants with it, thus reaping a rich Harvest ! 

One can conceive how this curious story originated, 
but what the Butcher Bird may be, which is little 
bigger than a Tit-mouse and lives in the marshes near 
London, I cannot determine. (The Bearded Tit ?) 

Herons, he tells us, occasionally take their fish on 
the wing by hovering as the Kingfisher does, but they 
do this only in the shallows, because in the deeper 
parts the fish, as soon as they see the Heron's shadow, 
could sink immediately and swim out of harm's reach. 
The reader will notice many more such extraordinary 
pieces of natural history to interest him, and amuse 
him. 

The Turtle is lachrymose and forlorn, for it sighs 
and sheds tears when turned over on its back. 

The Toad has only to sit at the bottom of a bush 
and to look a little attractive, when the giddy 
butterflies " fly down " its throat. A fascinating 
Toad! 

Goldsmith found some difficulty in deciding into 
what class he should put the Lizards. " They are 
excluded from the insects," he argues, " by their size, 
for, though the Newt may be looked upon in this 



THE "ANIMATED NATURE" 245 

contemptible light, a Crocodile would be a terrible 
insect indeed." 

Johnson, though in general he thoroughly under- 
stood Goldsmith's character, and correctly valued his 
abilities, was hardly right in describing him on the 
memorial in Westminster Abbey as physicus. How- 
ever, Johnson was quite unable to arrive at an exact 
estimate in this matter, for Natural History was a 
subject which he understood even less than did Gold- 
smith, notwithstanding that he knew Woodcocks must 
migrate; and thought he knew that Swallows "con- 
globulated together" at the bottoms of ponds and 
rivers in winter-time. In the sense that he wrote a 
Natural History, Goldsmith would perhaps consider 
himself entitled to be termed a naturalist, though 
some of us would be glad to earn such a distinction in 
so easy a manner. 

He loved Nature and all God's creatures, but he 
possessed an " invincible aversion " to caterpillars — 
which a naturalist would ascribe to his uneducated 
taste; he abhorred cruelty; and, with an Englishman's 
prejudice, hated Germany, "which is noted," he writes, 
" if not for truth, at least for want of invention." It is 
from this fact, among others, that he considers a 
German book to show some good marks of veracity ! 

There are very few who can spare time to study 
Nature deeply (miserabile dictu\ and the majority 
must content themselves "to view her as she offers, 



246 THE "ANIMATED NATURE" 

without searching into the recesses in which she ulti- 
mately hides " ; they must " take her as she presents 
herself, and, storing their minds with effects rather 
than causes, instead of the embarrassment of systems 
about which few agree," they must be satisfied " with 
the history of appearances concerning which all man- 
kind have but one opinion." It is for this class of 
people that " Animated Nature " was written. 

(1906. Extracts from Essay on " Goldsmith as a Naturalist," 
printed in the Zoologist,) 



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